Wäldchen vom Philosophenweg

2004-08-10T10:41:00.000-05:00

Changes

When I started this blog--or rather, when I first started designing it, as I had conceived and laid out the blog long before I began writing--I had certain ideas in mind regarding what sort of blog it was going to be, and those ideas were connected to intentions I had regarding what sort of scholar I thought I was going to be, what sort of academic, what sort of citizen, what sort of person. So I came up with a rather pretension name, "Wäldchen vom Philosophenweg," to try and capture all that. I like that phrase; it's still meaningful to me. Intellectually, the idea of spending one's time walking through tangled thickets of thought is a good one; surely it's a better approach of the life of the mind than many others.

Still, over the last few months--as this blog has been on hiatus, more or less--I've become less comfortable with remaining attached to all those ideas and intentions, now well over a year old. I don't think I'm heading in the sort of direction--whether in terms of my profession or my research or my opinions or my associations--that I thought I would be. Maybe one could say that my original vision was deeply entwined with the work I'd done my dissertation, and now I've moved beyond that; that would be accurate, but incomplete. The larger truth is, I simply feel a need to be less obligated, less connected, to any one particular intellectual "take" on the world rushing past me. If I'm to have an internet presence, I want it to be a less weighted, more minimal one; a place where if my scribblings don't add up to what I once thought they would add up to, well, at least they won't seem (to me, if no one else) quite so incongruous or incomplete.

So anyway, goodbye to the old blog, hello to the new: In Medias Res. A better name, I think, for this particular time in my life. Please change your blogrolls accordingly. I've stuck with Blogger, partly because Blogger has gotten better, but mostly because it's still the easiest and cheapest thing out there. I'll be leaving this blog up and all it's archives up, since it'll probably be a while before searches start turning up the new place rather than this one, but I won't be writing anything more here. Hope to see you around.

2004-07-13T16:47:00.000-05:00

An Announcement, and a Couple of Notes

Well, like last year, it appears that I'm pretty much going to be taking the entire summer off. I really intended to get back into the swing of things this month, but that's not going to happen; I still have a good month's worth of work in front of me, unfortunately. So while I've broken my vow to stay away from the blogosphere, and have (mostly) returned to my old reading habits, I wouldn't expect to see anything new here until the beginning of August at the earliest.

I've really enjoyed reading Jacob Levy's numerous intelligent defenses of his decision to (probably) vote for Kerry. Despite the fact that Jacob and I have pretty significant differences in our basic moral and philosophical positions regarding politics, despite the fact that both of us dissent from the mainstream political parties in significant ways, I think our very different boats are heading in the same direction this election year. For a couple of political theorists, it's a bit disconcerting to realize that one's vote, this time around, is being dictated not so much by ideas or arguments as simple "competence/honesty/expertise" issues, as Jacob put it. But then, Bush's serious lacking in all three of those has disconcerted a lot of people, right-wing libertarians and left-wing communitarians alike.

As for the rest of the blogosphere, I can't wait to see what Laura comes up with once she's in her new home; like Harry, I'm essentially a fuddy-duddy who wishes I lived in a society that endorsed my desire to leave youth behind; and Timothy, depressingly, is still on vacation. At least I'm not the only one.

2004-06-01T12:51:00.000-05:00

Behold the Power of Blog(s)

This also has nothing to do with all the work I'm supposed to be accomplishing during my current hiatus (question for Jacob: does a couple of months equal "long-term"?), but as I've recently finalized my plans for attending next September's American Political Science Association annual meeting, and as several bloggers are talking about their current blog-related research, I thought I'd mention an event at this year's APSA conference that promises to be interesting. Presumably everyone directly or tangentially involved already knows about it, but just to take official notice: check out this panel. "The Power and Politics of Blogs," featuring Daniel W. Drezner as chair, a paper by Antoinette Pole, comments by Cass Sunstein, and a panel of big names to argue about it all for the viewing audience's entertainment and benefit: Henry Farrell of Crooked Timber, Mark A.R. Kleiman, Mickey Kaus, and Andrew Sullivan. It's an interesting line-up: Kleiman is a passionate but relatively centrist Democrat; Kaus is a cantakerous and unconventional social egalitarian who sounds more like a Republican all the time; Farrell is both a liberal and a social democrat; and Sullivan and Drezner are your classic socially moderate, libertarian-leaning, free trade-supporting, mostly Republican-voting hawks. There might be some real fireworks, depending on how the discussion goes. Of course, one probably won't get any profound insight into why political blog readership skews so overwhelmingly male from this rather heavily XY chromosome-patterned panel, but hey, you can't have everything.

Actually, more than anything which might actually be discussed I'm interested in how this panel will play out in the blogosphere. Obviously all of the participants are likely to mention it on their blogs, as will some of those who may be in attendance. (Chris? Laura? Jacob?) Some may even blog about it at length...which could lead to subsequent blog-replies from the other participants, thus creating an internet simulacrum of the original panel! But really, that's just the post-game show: what about simul-blogging the panel as it happens? How many bloggers with laptops will be present in the audience, blogging these bloggers' comments about blogs on their own blogs as they speak? A few? (The conference is in Chicago; think we could get the Crescat Sententia gang to crash the room?) Personally, I think we should try to get as many as possible--it could be the blogospheric equivalent of a perfect storm!
Update: Looks like Chris plans to be there. And I have been informed that Laura is involved in the panel as well. I should have figured that out. Anyway, that should definitely further reduce any chance of this panel degenerating into an overly masculine "He-Men of the Blogging Universe Smackdown." (Which is a shame, sort of. Sullivan vs. Farrell, for the title? Could have been bloody...)

2004-05-21T15:02:00.000-05:00

Thoughts on Education (in Abstract, and in Arkansas)

It's been a productive few weeks. I thought I'd be posting somewhat regularly on my book and some reading I'm doing in relation to it, but that hasn't happened yet. Perhaps in June. In the meantime, for a variety of reasons I've been thinking a lot about education this past week, and though it doesn't have anything to do with any of my current projects, I thought I'd put down some of my (rambling, lengthy) thoughts this Friday afternoon, if only to reward the handful of people who continue to come by (don't worry; the summer won't last forever).

Megan, our seven-year-old, finished up her second grade year at Hillcrest Elementary on Thursday. She had a good year, though not as good as she did in kindergarten and first grade; Megan is a sensitive girl, and she was made uncomfortable by the way in which her talents and test scores were highlighted by her teacher and used (mostly implicitly, but sometimes explicitly, to our chagrin) as a benchmark to critique the performance of her classmates. However, given the demographics of the school, that may have been inevitable. Hillcrest, which is in the Jonesboro School District here in Jonesboro, AR, is the largest in the area, the wealthiest (that is, it receives the most city and state money), but also serves the poorest segment of students in the city; for this reason (among others) it has a bad reputation among many locals, and has suffered a great deal from white flight over past few decades. Depending on what you're looking for in a school, though, that's not necessarily a negative; one fine member of our church--a native of the area, a blue-collar fellow and hardly any sort of guilt-ridden liberal intellectual--told us over dinner one evening that he and his wife had chosen to live within the Jonesboro School District specifically because they considered the implicit racism exhibited in other, outlying districts to be intolerable. A subjective judgment, to be sure. And not the sort of thing which ought to be the sole determining factor when deciding where to educate one's children; standing on principle is and should be easily outweighed by concerns over safety and adequate instruction. Fortunately, we haven't been faced with such a stark choice yet. And in the meantime I do take some satisfaction from the fact that Megan's best friend from school, the one she spends the most time with and talked about homework with and whom she visits and invites over regularly, is Sediah, a quite poor black girl from a crowded, welfare-dependent home. It would be foolish to try to articulate the social worth of such a friendship in accordance with some rigorous egalitarian scheme...but that does not mean I cannot recognize it as a good thing, a thing that, in too many places at least, there doesn't seem to be nearly as much of as one might think there ought to be.

The arguments and assumptions which surround the local debate over Jonesboro School District--a large district with a big central high school, a great number and variety of classes, programs and activities, but of course also more discipline problems, more poor kids and more bureaucracy--are a microcosm of the debates which have characterized public education in Arkansas over the last few years. Big schools vs. little schools, increased opportunity vs. intimate involvement--it's a complicated and divisive set of arguments, one which just about every school system has struggled with at one point or another. Just this week, at least one strand of those debates in Arkansas appeared to come full circle: Lake View School District--a tiny (about 160 students total), rural, all-black school district in Arkansas's southeastern Delta region--was instructed by a state board that it would have to consolidate with a neighboring (mostly white) school district. What is ironic about this is that it was Lake View School District's complaints about unequal school funding, complaints which ultimately resulted in a series of lawsuits (lasting over a decade) that challenged the constitutionality of Arkansas's school funding arrangement in the first place...a challenge that eventually led the state to a set of decisions which included dissolving (excuse me, "consolidating") Lake View.

School consolidation has been on everyone's mind here in Arkansas ever since Governor Mike Huckabee recanted his opposition to such after his election in 2002. What changed his mind was the threat that the Arkansas Supreme Court would take over the state's schools, unless something was done to satisfy, in their eyes, the education clause in the Arkansas Constitution which states that "the State shall ever maintain a general, suitable and efficient system of free public schools." Huckabee argued that district consolidation had to be part of any reform proposal: Arkansas simply did not have the funds or tax base to make up the inequalities directly, and fewer school districts (Arkansas has over three hundred) with a consequently larger pool of teachers to share would, he claimed, be able to provide a greater variety of classes to more students (thus presumably somewhat equalizing the great disparity in educational resources around the state) at little extra cost. Huckabee originally suggested that districts with under 1,500 students total be consolidated--which would have affected nearly three-quarters of Arkansas's school districts, thought he also proposed exceptions for especially isolated or highly performing school districts. Predictably, this did not go over well with the state legislature. But ultimately, a bill was passed which mandated the "administrative consolidation" of districts with under 350 students. Huckabee didn't like it, but it was something. The public was divided about it, but no other solution carried much support either. And anyway you look at it, Lake View itself--a Reconstruction-era, former sharecropping community that has suffered from rural poverty for decades--simply couldn't avoid the chopping block.

There are so many things that could be said about this dilemma--about the profound injustice involved in tying so much of school funding to the local and state tax base, about the burdens of Bush's spectacularly under-funded No Child Left Behind mandates, about the mania for testing and standards and how that undermines clear thinking about what different schools in diverse socio-economic settings can or ought to be expected to offer their students. To me, the most interesting issue is how one ought to conceive community obligations when small localities confront a larger one. Some communitarians defended rural school district advocates; I couldn't, simply because I think the civic project of education can properly (not to mention pragmatically) be understood as a communal concern for the whole state as well. But that doesn't make hard choices any easier. It would have been nice if the legal juggernaut which Lake View had put in motion had resulted in legislation which attempted to engage with some sort of deeper, more fundamental and better reform. There are all sorts of things I would like to see explored: perhaps reforms along lines suggested by Matthew Miller (see here and here, where he talks about ways in which vouchers could be distributed more equitably and restrictions on teachers could be loosened, thereby making them both more responsible and accountable), or Harry Brighouse (who in his book here talks about turning school choice into a tool for those who care about the autonomy of students), or any the many advocates of charter schools (here, for example) despite their admittedly profound disagreements with one another. But that wasn't to be. What we did have was an admirable resistance by the governor to the lottery-money-for-education delusion which has suckered so many state governments, and thus a need to raise whatever additional money could be found through a sales tax, and then push for some boundary restructuring in the hopes that what money there was could be distributed with slightly fewer inequities than before. This is the course Governor Huckabee pursued, sometimes honestly and sometimes not, but in the end it was one I supported. Not without discomfort: another member of our church is a school teacher in a district which serves a small farming community 30 miles west of here; his district is being consolidated, the local parents are devastated, and he will likely have to look for a new job. He's a wonderful teacher, and deserves better. But no comprehensive reform could ever make things easy for him, or for the people of Lake View, or for anyone who hopes to make public education work. It's enough to make you despair (which is part of the explanation for why so many of my siblings home school their children). But then I look at Megan, and her friends, and I think: there's too much good here to not keep trying to find some way to hold on to the principle of the thing.

Anyway, summer's here. Onward and upward into the third grade, next year.

2004-04-29T12:59:00.000-05:00

A Shift in Focus (In Other Words a Hiatus, Of Sorts)

Now that I've handed out my last final, and seeing that all I've managed to do lately is play catch-up, I may as well make official what I've been contemplating for the last few weeks. For a variety of personal and professional reasons, I'm going to be significantly scaling back my blogging--or more accurately, my blog-reading and blog-responding--for the next couple of months, perhaps for the whole summer. Of course, it's not like I'm a truly productive blogger (I'm pretty much confined to the Flappy Bird level of the blogospheric ecosystem), but I always have spent a good chunk of my time reading and contributing to and commenting on other blogs, here and elsewhere. That's going to change, at least for the time being. I have a few projects that having been laying around for months (even years), and if I don't finish or make good progress towards finishing them this summer, I might as well give up on them. Furthermore, I think my writing, both professional and personal, has been affected, and not necessarily in a good way, by my engagement with the blogosphere; I wonder if I'm losing my sense of how to carefully listen to, think through, and respond to a narrow and specific argument or idea, in favor of speaking rapidly and broadly. That's not an indictment of this form of discourse by any means. But I think I need a break from it, nonetheless.

I'll still post material here (perhaps around once a week or so) for the next couple of months, but whatever I put up will be reviews of books I'm reading, drafts of or notes on the book I'm writing, and other sundry research-related junk. (In other words, look for a lot of political theory stuff on nationality, community, identity, not to mention my guy Johann Gottfried Herder.) Occasionally my attention will probably wander and I may put up an essay that branches off into other areas I'm interested in (the EU, East Asia, Islam, religion, education, family, whatever), but I'm going to try my best to avoid topicality, since that will just drag me back to my favorite blogs all over again. I'm determined to keep to this schedule at least through July, when I'll be teaching a summer course here at ASU; maybe I'll keep it up longer. We'll see. (I'll probably continue to blog at Times and Seasons, though probably no more frequently than I will here.)

I figure there's probably 50-75 people who really do check my blog out regularly, as opposed to just happening to stop by; to those folks, my deepest thanks, and I hope you'll find some interest in what I put up, and what my summer work produces. In the meantime, since I just mentioned "my favorite blogs" above, I thought I may as well list them here, so anyone who doesn't already read them can know what I'm giving up. While I'm gone, read: Paul Cella, Kevin Drum, Amitai Etzioni, Noah Millman, Timothy Burke, Hugo Schwyzer, Laura at Apt. 11D, the whole gang at Crooked Timber, almost everyone at The Volokh Conspiracy, the same for Innocents Abroad, everyone at the beautifully redesigned A Fistful of Euros, Daniel Drezner, Nathan Newman, Matthew Yglesias, and of course, Andrew Sullivan. (I know, I know: you feel like you don't need to read him anymore either, and yet, you still do. Me too.)

Have a good summer, everyone.

2004-04-27T17:13:00.000-05:00

Some More Links and Comments (Playing Catch-Up Again)

It's finals week here at ASU, and so I'm busier than usual. I've also been doing more self-evaluation than is usual; one result is some likely changes in my blogging habits, at least as soon as I get a few things off of my chest. To wit:

Matt Ygelsias wrote in defense of the draft (or at least the principle of the draft), then defended himself from the criticisms of Julian Sanchez, who was then backed up by Will Wilkinson. I've expressed my broadly communitarian support for the draft or other national service-type policies a couple of times before, so I'll content myself with basically agreeing with Matt, and picking on one point of Will's. He writes (in reference to Matt's point that the libertarian opposition to state "interference" with one's life plans doesn't acknowledge the degree to which the state and other social institutions cannot avoid being central to life-plan conceptualization) that welfare-liberals...naively overestimate the ability of state institutions to create positive expectations, and underestimate the ability of the system of voluntary institutions to not only shape positive expectations, but to lead people to search through the space of possible life plans, and present the best of these through the popular culture, in a way that enhances our abilities to formulate a fitting conception of our good." True enough, but that's not really the point, is it? No reasonable person would deny that state involvement in defining one's personal choices is a crude instrument. What must be acknowledged, however, is that maintaining the "space [for searching through] possible life plans" depends the maintenance of particular collective goods. Furthermore, the popular culture and the market (the "system of voluntary institutions," in other words) which libertarians presumably trust to sustain those goods is and always will be reflective of the interests and agendas of those with the material and social resources to influence it; that is, they're inegalitarian. And while the interest in individual choice may well tolerate the preservation of certain baseline conditions through what are strictly speaking inegalitarian modes of activity (say, for example, endowment-sensitive public education opportunities), the existence of such patterns in other areas of common life--most particularly, the armed forces of a society--can have (and arguably is already having) terrible civic consequences. In short, even if you agree in principle with the libertarian desire for individuals to enjoy a politically unencumbered search for their own personal good, and believe that social necessities will by and large be "invisibly" satisfied by such, brute civic realities suggest this cannot be so at least insofar as national defense and similar service obligations are concerned. (This is not, of course, a defense of any particular draft policy, much less any particular instance of drafting; this is a rebuke to those who thinking there's no reason to be concerned if the armed services ought to operate along the exact same voluntary the same lines as any other social need.)

At Crooked Timber, Harry Brighouse called his readers attention to a valuable study by Caroline Hoxby on the voucher program in Milwaukee; it prompted an excellent discussion (replicated at Daniel Drezner's blog), where a lot of the main criticisms and possibilities for voucher-driven reforms of the public school system were discussed. Harry is an advocate of "progressive school vouchers" (as am I, though our approaches would be slightly different; given my understanding of the delicate relationship between civic maintenance and religious belief, I'm supportive of assuring those who wish their children to attend parochial schools special consideration), and as such, was impressed with Hoxby's work. Matt Yglesias pointed out some holes in Hoxby's analysis, but not enough, I think, to slow down the basic truthfulness of her argument: that vouchers can empower at the very least a selective portion of parents who currently have no alternatives to the public school market. Matt's general conclusion is to say that, even if that is so, "we're hardly going to enact a law giving vouchers to African-Americans but not to members of other racial/ethnic groups." That may be so, at least under the current all-or-nothing mentality which prevents creative thinking by both public school defenders and opponents alike. But if public schooling was understood, as it ought to be, as a more populist enterprise, which joined civic imperatives to local inputs (as best exemplified in the charter school movement), then there might be more flexibility out there, enough for people to recognize that vouchers can serve as an important tool for focusing public money without necessarily losing sight of the overall public ends in mind.

Hugo Schwyzer has another typically insightful and honest post up about the lack of respect and knowledge (regarding both oneself and the realities of social life) demonstrated by women who think nothing of wearing scanty attire in public places--and more particularly, by those who would defend dressing provocatively as a display of self-affirmation, when in reality it's a way of selling oneself. To quote Hugo: "[I]n our culture, rightly or wrongly, revealing dress, sexuality, and self-esteem are inextricably linked. I recognize as well that revealing dress fosters a culture of competition, even among college-aged women, and that competitiveness does irreparable damage to the already fragile bonds of gender solidarity that those of us in this field are working so hard to foster....As feminists, we simultaneously must hold in tension a desire not to shame the female body with a desire not to foster a culture of competitiveness and objectification. We must hold in tension the importance of individual rights of self-expression with the community's right not to be offended."

Finally, also from Crooked Timber, Henry Farrell invokes the blessed Invisible Adjunct, and points to the very Calvinistic (or at least, the Weberian interpretation thereof) mentality which attempts to justify academic markets, which are so very plainly neither as meritocratic nor as neutral as advertised. Brayden King confirms this mentality, trying convince himself that his merit (which is no doubt significant) will reward him with a tenure-track job. For my own pseudo-Calvinistic reasons, I'm doubtful, but I wish Brayden the best of luck.

2004-04-20T21:58:00.000-05:00

Some Links

Laura excerpts some wonderful material from a City Journal article by Kay S. Hymowitz, and adds some thoughtful comments of her own. As I've discussed before, often following Laura's lead, a lot of Generation Xers, broadly speaking, are willing to risk the label "conservative" if that's what it takes to maintain a healthy, child-friendly home and marriage. In Hymowitz's words, they--we--are "nostalgic for the childhood that boomers supposedly had....growing up in the aftermath of America's great marriage meltdown, [it is] no wonder that young people put so much stock in marriage and family, their bedrock in the mobile twenty-first century." That's the sort of language that sets many libertarian liberals off...yet the desire for security, stability and domesticity is real, in so many very ordinary yet meaningful ways. As Laura puts it, "it might be corny, but I just think [it's] just smart."

Hugo Schwyzer is a brave blogger. Besides having of late shown his colors as a pro-life feminist and an advocate of gay rights who is nonetheless willing to defend those who critique it on Biblical grounds, Hugo has put up two very excellent posts on how pornography exploits both the women trapped in it and the men who consume it (though obviously in very different ways). A representative excerpt:

"Like in so many other areas (abortion, plastic surgery) we frame the debate about pornography in terms of choices. Women should have the choice to work in porn. Men should have the choice to work in porn. Women and men should have the choice to consume porn as well. As long as everyone (performer, producer, marketer, consumer) is over 18, where is the harm? The harm is in my soul when I view it. The harm is in Lara Roxx's [a performer in a pornographic film that was unknowingly infected with HIV] body right now....You can say she has some culpability, and I agree, she does. But the only reason the money is so good for young women in porn is because men are willing to pay quite a bit to see girls like Lara naked and exposed and penetrated. I confess that in the past I have been guilty of that very sin....When men like me lust after girls like she who is called Lara Roxx (she's 18, I'll be damned if I'll call her a grown woman), we scar our spirits and tarnish our relationships with all the other women in our lives as a consequence....The fact that many young girls and women choose to make themselves objects of desire does not lessen for one second my obligation to look past that veneer and see them as my younger sisters whom I need to honor, love, and care for....Porn kills many things: innocence, hope, trust, health, bodies, spirits. I know it is hip today to proclaim it harmless, but the unfashionable fact is that this is an industry built on distorted fantasy, loneliness, and despair. And we on the left need to stop hiding behind the First Amendment issues and articulate this untrendy but vital truth."

Powerful stuff. But of course, as always, read the whole thing.

2004-04-18T00:39:00.000-05:00

What Jon Said (or, Where Do I Stand? What Can Bush Do? Part II)

Ozymandias: "I did the right thing, didn't I? It all worked out in the end."
Dr. Manhattan: "'In the end'? Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends."

The line is from Watchmen, if you're not up on your Alan Moore. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

So on Saturday, David Brooks described himself as a "more humble hawk," a semi-repentant supporter of the Bush's vision of the war in Iraq who has come to realize that he "misunderstood how normal Iraqis would react to our occupation," "did not appreciate how our very presence in Iraq would overshadow democratization," "assumed, wrongly, that the administration would launch a fresh postwar initiative to globalize the reconstruction effort," and so forth. He concludes that "We hawks were wrong about many things. But in opening up the possibility for a slow trudge toward democracy, we were still right about the big thing." Matthew Ygelsias, in an excellent, reflective post, describes Brooks's piece as "the first of what I think will be many retrospective I was wrong but I was right anyway articles. The implication here is that though Bush may botch everything in Iraq, Brooks was nevertheless correct to have supported the war because he, after all, was not in favor of botching things." Matt goes on explain what's wrong with this position:

"The trouble...is this. When George W. Bush is president and is advocating a war and you, too, are advocating for war, then the fact of the matter is that you are advocating that the war be conducted by George W. Bush....The striking thing is that many people...saw this very clearly, and yet didn't see it. Kenneth Pollack is the crucial case. Well before the war began, he released The Threatening Storm. Since that was a book and not a newspaper op-ed, it did not advocate 'invading Iraq' but rather advocated an entire Iraq policy, complete with loads of details. It was obvious by the time war broke out, that while Bush was invading Iraq, and while the Pollack policy involved an invasion of Iraq, that Bush was not implementing the Pollack policy. I know this is true because, among other things, Pollack said so at the time. Pollack nevertheless did not jump off the bandwagon and join the anti-war team. This is, shall we say with some understatement, a political strategy that is open to criticism."

Matt goes on to acknowledge that this describes his behavior during 2002 and early 2003 as well, for which he blames vanity: "'Bush is right to say we should invade Iraq, but he's going about it the wrong way, here is my nuanced wonderfullness' sounds much more intelligent than some kind of chant at an anti-war rally. In fact, however, it was less intelligent. I got off the bandwagon right before the shooting started, but by then it was far too late--this was more a case of CYA than a case of efficacious political dissent."

I respect Matt a lot for writing this post, not the least reason for which being the fact that his analysis describes my own trajectory to a great degree as well. Brayden King praised my recent repudiation of my old and always ambivalent pro-war position, which is kind of him, but the fact is that I always was, and still remain, like Matt "stuck in the middle"--indeed, perhaps moreso. I supported the war because, fundamentally, the idea appealed to me: it made sense, it matched what I thought ought and could be possible in a world of danger and oppression where the meaning of sovereignty had changed but the role of national power hadn't. Saddam Hussein's Iraq was criminal tyranny, an obstacle and blight partly of our own making, and a potential threat; as Matt continues to point out, the problem with a great many of those who were opposed to the war was their inability or unwillingness to engage the problem of Iraq seriously. That is, most of Bush's opponents adopted an opposition to the war which was "simple and wrong" as opposed to one which was "right but difficult," as Michael Walzer put it. (This is not a slam on principled pacifists; a consistent pacifism counts as a difficult and worthy position.) I suppose a lot of us liberals who came to support the war did so because we assumed that we were taking, along the lines Matt suggests, the "difficult" road, one that dealt honestly with what we had in hand (i.e., the Bush administration) while still holding onto our ideals. That was shortsighted, to say the least.

Of course, it is talk like that which makes strident opponents of the war (on both the left and the right) think that folks like me are still deluded, imagining that the war could have worked, should have worked--in other words, that the principle of Wilsonian intervention, however we articulate it, is not fundamentally unsound--assuming conditions were right (for example, if Blair had been running the show, and not Bush). A conservative friend of mine, who has opposed the war from the beginning, continues to press me on this point. What do I think might have been different? And more importantly, if I can always imagine that something might have been, or should have been, different, then is there any way my idea-driven willingness to support efforts such as these can ever truly be tested, much less falsified? If not (if I can always say "see, that's how it should have been done"), then aren't my convictions more fantasies than arguments?

He's not wrong to question me so; his position (in which national interest in a traditional realist sense combines with a respect for, and suspicion of, the magnitude of culture difference between us and the targets--like Iraq--of our aspirations) is the more rigorous one. But I cannot embrace it (though I can learn from it, and perhaps come to trust its wisdom more), because I just don't find the lines he draws to be nearly so clear or compelling. So I think my response to him and others, my response to the retort that I'm simply moving my own "lines" around at will, must be: my convictions entail, or rather are part and parcel to, a set of practices; the principles which I believed (and still believe) could be worth fighting a war over must mean that the wars I could support must be, strictly speaking, principled wars. That is, the test of the validity of these ideas (about democracy and intervention and liberation) is in their execution itself. Which is what leads me back to Brooks, and to the exchange from Watchmen I started out with.

Brooks concludes his piece by writing that "in 20 years, no one will doubt that Bush did the right thing." Twenty years--a whole generation! What I find remarkable about that isn't the length of time itself (which is perfectly reasonable, if not overly optimistic, in light of the dynamics of social change), but that it makes time part of the argument, and yet takes a stand in regards to that time; it is as if Brooks were saying: "We're now part of Iraqi history, and so one must let what the U.S. has done work itself out historically. We need to see things not in terms of their immediate costs, but their ultimate ends." But Brooks cannot see those ends, and neither can I--not simply because we're not prophets, but because there is not and cannot be an "end" in the sense he is talking about to which any given intervention can be locked into. Twenty years of events will precede that "end," and follow it, and the invasion of Iraq will become one more element in a historical tapestry. That's not an argument against action per se, but it is an argument against hypothesizing a result which will justify what came before.

In Watchmen, a superhero named Adrian Veidt (Ozymandias) comes to the conclusion that humankind will destroy itself unless all countries can unite against a common foe (the story takes place in 1985). So he constructs an elaborate conspiracy about an alien foe, which results in the death of 3 million people and the wholesale transformation of human society. After all is said and done, Adrian confesses to Jon Osterman (Dr. Manhattan), another superhero with truly godlike powers, that he is troubled by the costs of his actions, but looks confidently towards the end that his efforts were directed towards. Jon, who is essentially omniscient, offers him no comfort: "Nothing ever ends."

I'm not accusing Bush of being Ozymandias; I don't think he has anything like that level of arrogance, and I don't think his "intervention" is anywhere near so total or extreme. But he has intervened, and increasingly it seems that action has been understood not on its own terms (what is Iraq like? what can we responsibly do? how can our ideals be applied?), but in terms of what it will, presumably, end up meaning. As I've mentioned before, perhaps interventionism is unavoidable in the present moment. If that is so, if the intractable ugliness of most our choices will always be with us, whether we respond to tyranny or poverty or abuse or not, then does that mean we can say nothing to those who intervene, who act, who get things done, whether or not they're done in the way we think is best? One certainly can't complain that Bush doesn't get things done. But still: one can refuse to get caught up in the supposing of future possibilities, and insist that whatever does happen, to whatever end, cannot be justified on such a basis. Such projections, contra Brooks, aren't nearly humble enough; they do not consider that the fact of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and elimination of Saddam Hussein will, strictly speaking, never end. So you have to look from moment to moment, rather than any given outcome; you have to look at intentions, yes, but also immediate obligations and attendant realities--you cannot put them off, and just assume that things will "come around." One might think that this is just a long-winded way of making an argument for prudence, for never trusting any one idea too far, for being conscious of burdens, and it is partly that. But I believe there is an important reason to put things this way. President Bush, whatever his virtues (and he has many), seems to be, and seems to inspire or expect the people around him to be, tunnel-thinkers: focusing in on a threat or need, they undertake their work and concentrate on that future point where they plan to emerge, at which time they assume conditions will be exactly as they expected them to be when they down their chosen rabbit hole. And you know, maybe they will be. Then again, maybe they won't. And either way, an awful lot of people have been carried down into those rabbit holes along with them. Those people have to be made part of the action, even if it slows one down, even if it means you can't go as far as you need to go, even if some of those who refuse to go along are plainly in the wrong. Such is the price of living in a community, both a national and an international one: maybe communal concerns can somewhat set aside the imposition of bright lines ("sovereignty," etc.) which guide action, but they should also make clearer the participatory and collective requirements of such actions at the same time.

What does all this mean for Iraq? It means that my convictions (and Bush's, or at least those of many others around him and supportive of him) were only useful to Iraq to the degree that we attended to the existing Iraq, not the future Iraq. I cannot and will not say democratic intervention can ever be entirely off the table of policy options; there is too much at stake, too much relevance, and too much moral truth to the argument such a (appropriately humbled and "realistic") Wilsonianism embodies for that. But I know better now than I knew a year ago that my principles cannot be practicable on the basis of what can/will happen later, in the end; if they are not present before us in a real way (and even the most ardent apologists of the Bush administration and American democratic imperialism suspected long before the shooting started that they mostly were not), then those principles really are just fantasies: counter-factual hopes, without justificatory power. We can and should still hope and work for a better future in Iraq (and a future for other countries suffering under tyranny as well), as so many of the Iraqi people have themselves so hoped. And it's not at all unlikely that a great many Iraqis, given what options were before them, will say that any intervention was better than none.* But that's not enough to build a theoretical justification upon. At the very least one should admit (as Bush almost certainly will not) that we liberal (inter)nationalists have done the people of Iraq no great favors by being willing, even with the best of intentions, to carry them along towards a specific end that we pictured in our minds, but towards which they, far more than we, will have to struggle painfully day by day.

*Johann Hari, a more coherently humbled hawk than Brooks, notes in an excellent essay on his own feelings and observations that "in the recent BBC poll (hardly a pro-war source), fewer than 10 per cent [of Iraqis] said they had confidence in the occupying forces, for example, and 41 per cent admitted they found the invasion humiliating. These are not the answers of a terrified people censoring themselves. So we can trust the same polls when--among many legitimate criticisms of the coalition--they also find that 56 per cent of Iraqis say their lives are better than before the war. Only 15 per cent want the coalition troops to leave immediately."

2004-04-15T14:43:00.000-05:00

Update (Regarding Liberal Reasoning)

Jay, writing at Moment, Linger On, has this to say about my recent post which mentioned Stephen Newman's article in Dissent defending Alabama Gov. Bob Riley's willingness to make public policy arguments via "comprehensive" religious or moral reasons, in contrast to "publicly accessible" secular ones:

"Newman and Fox are essentially talking about me and this doesn't jibe with my recollection of how I felt about this....In fact, I don't recall any criticism of Riley because he was motivated by his Christian beliefs rather than secular reasons. And apparently Newman doesn't either, because he provides exactly no evidence to support this in his article....Newman does nothing but set up a 'hostile secular liberal' strawman and then knock it down. And that's all he can do, because he completely misrepresents the position of secular Rawlsians like myself. We don't reject arguments for things that we agree with because they aren't public arguments but rather arguments for positions which can't be supported by any public reasons. This is not even a subtle distinction and I'm surprised that people of Newman's and Fox's intelligence and education fail to see it....[P]erhaps, in the abstract world of academia where Newman and Fox live, there are actually people who demand such secular purity. But in the real world, where I support real policy positions and want to see them implemented, I'm perfectly happy to work with people whose motivations are different than mine."

A couple of points before addressing the main issue. One, Newman made it pretty clear in the article that we was responding to an argument, not necessarily particular individuals who made that argument in this particular case. What he wrote was that "there is an influential trend in contemporary liberal political theory that requires us to regard Riley's biblically inspired case for tax reform with suspicion." This is undeniably true: consider Richard Rorty, Kent Greenawalt, Bruce Ackerman, and many more. Two, Jay is probably correct that there were not a great many "philosophically correct" liberal opponents to Riley's proposed reform of the tax code jumping down his throat for daring to suggest that such social justice is what Jesus would want--but then, on the other hand, there were more than a few social justice organizations that stayed out of the debate in Alabama, at least partly because they found the whole thing (why, an evangelical Republican using our language--imagine!) distasteful. While electoral politics and stereotypes probably had a lot to do with that, the fact that many of these organizations have long since become firmly entrenched in the secular liberal establishment was certainly a factor as well. So Jay, while correct, needs to consider who did not speak up as much as who did.

Jay's more important claim is that Newman and I misunderstand the Rawlsian position; that we are creating straw men. Obviously, in any work of political theory there is going to be some imagining going on; that's how you draw principles and ideas out of the quotidian. But that said, is he correct? Is it defensible to say that, according to Rawls, the only target of secular liberal ire is "arguments for positions which can't be supported by any public reasons" whatsoever, whereas anything that can be concurred with via "public reasoning" is acceptable? If so, what would that actually mean for argumentative practice?

Generally speaking, one might believe the Rawlsian standard is a good one; it allows, within limits, for the possibility of (as Jay puts it) "work[ing] with people whose motivations are different" from one's own on behalf of common concerns. And indeed, Newman endorses this: Rawls's doctrine of an "overlapping consensus" is not, in principle, what he (or I) criticize. What is of concern, however, is the sense (which Jay may or may not share) that such a consensus cannot, if it is to be anything more than a brief modus vivendi, be constructed out of one or any number of wholly unique comprehensive (and therefore "private" in classical liberal terminology) reasons; as Newman put it, according to Rawls "shared ends are insufficient to anchor the liberal polity; there must be shared justifications as well." Or as Rawls himself wrote in the introduction to the second edition of Political Liberalism: private/religious/comprehensive doctrines can be brought forward as part of the argument for particular public policies "provided that in due course public reasons, given by a reasonable political conception, are presented sufficient to support whatever the comprehensive doctrine are introduced to support." In other words, in the secular liberal version of the overlapping consensus, religious reasons like Riley's should only play a supplemental role; if they actually played a majoritarian or otherwise fundamentally persuasive role in the public's decisions, then conscientious liberals ought not support them. (Given this claim of Rawls's, it is not surprising to see him in the same essay struggling to justify as legitimate by his own lights the huge role played by plainly religious arguments in the success of abolitionism, or the civil rights movement.)

I choose to describe such acts of persuasion as "fundamental" because those are the sorts of arguments which are most put on the spot by liberal reasoning conducted in a Rawlsian vein: fundamentalist claims. I don't mean that category of doctrines usually described in American today as "fundamentalist" (though obviously many of those religious doctrines are relevant to the discussion here); I mean any comprehensive outlook that has both ethical and ontological dimensions. Sometimes those dimensions parallel the American experience closely enough that they can be accepted as "public" reasons without the slightest trouble (for example, the clearly comprehensive and in many ways religious claim that all human beings have fundamental "rights"); but frequently that isn't the case, such as when fundamentalists take on dominant cultural presumptions, whether in regards to sexual mores, market commodification, or any other rarely interrogated public phenomenon. Rawls's view of public reasoning requires such believers to do one of several things (here I am borrowing from the work of Andrew Murphy): change their comprehensive beliefs to fit the standard of publicity, lie, change the parameters of public debate through civil disobedience or other direct actions, or simply testify as their convictions and hope someone eventually comes along with (or they come up with) a secular rationale to cover for their previous, outlandish claims. While obviously there is something to each of these options, would it really be so hard to imagine that Rawls's conception of a "legitimate," freestanding, puntatively rational overlapping consensus, could be replaced by a more agonistic, context-based, dialogical and hermeneutical one--one which, rather than assuming the necessity of preventing the formation of democratic majorities using exclusive, comprehensive arguments, is open to the possibility that even people with fundamental disagreements (say, secularists and Christians in Alabama) could civilly engage in (in Kenneth Strike's words) "argumentative reciprocity"? Why not allow the overlapping consensus to emerge out of fundamental exchanges, even (perhaps Christian) fundamentalist exchanges, rather than previously accepted (and to a certain degree imposed) "public reasons," if that is what people find persuasive? Obviously there are matters of concern here; making agonistic civility into a reality, where persons and their arguments are accorded dignity because of their role in the discussion and not because of the category of their arguments, will involve a lot of trust, as well as constant boundary-drawing and redrawing. Many distrust this kind of expressivist approach, and to be sure it does lead one into sticky issues of establishment, dissent, minority rights, and so forth. But to dismiss such an approach simply because of the (often more perceived than real) difficulties involved is to minimize, perhaps marginalize or even undermine, right from the outset certain fundamental commitments and critiques (like, arguably, Bob Riley's), and that is something progressive thinkers ought to be reluctant to do. (As you might be guessing, I've written on this topic before.)

This isn't, I suppose, necessarily a response to Jay's basic concern--arguably, the procedural Rawlsian claim which Newman and I disagree with isn't fully present in any actual real-world debates, but only in the "abstract world of academia." If so, I can only plead guilty: I'm an academic. But to the extent that academics, and those educated by them, weigh in on debates in the real world, then it's worth thinking hard about the unstated categories within which secular debates (like debates about taxation) often operate.

2004-04-15T13:08:00.000-05:00

Where Do I Stand? What Can Bush Do?

To very belatedly put my cards on the table regarding Iraq: I can no longer pretend that my past (and, to a degree, continuing) willingness to defend (some of) Bush's rationales for the interventionist war he has waged in Iraq can, in any way, be spun into excuses which get me out of being implicated in the consequences of Bush's actual performance as commander-in-chief of this intervention. That is, I'm part of the problem. Whatever my thoughts and concerns about democratic imperialism or national strength or international force, I had every opportunity to acknowledge that evidence of the Bush administration's interest working out a responsible policy which reflected any of these concerns was scanty, at best. We saw the lack of thought in the way the Bush approached the U.N., dealt with Turkey, conducted the war in Afghanistan. The fundamentals of Bush's decisions were defensible; the level attention paid to them was not. I ignored the signs, and went with my ideological preferences. It was wrong, or at least not sufficiently thoughtful, for me to do so. (Sound of crow being consumed.)

Of all the liberal nationalists/neo-Wilsonians/democratic internationalists my thinking was most affected by--Hitchens, Packer, Walzer, Berman, Ignatieff, etc., and of course Tony Blair--Walzer appears to have had the most steady grasp of things, as he always counseled against "this war" but not necessarily against (some of) the principles under which it was fought. Blair, of course, politically can't say what he thinks of Bush & Co.; someday we'll learn, and it should be interesting to hear. Hitchens is in profound denial, and Berman is too invested in linking Iraq to his grand philosophy of Islamic fascism to accept any rethinking. Packer and Ignatieff's comments are, I think, closest to where my thoughts are now. Packer clearly still thinks, as I do, that no one in their right mind would still want Saddam Hussein in power, yet is willing to think about (look here and scroll down) "the limits of war as an instrument of political transformation and the limits of America as its standard-bearer. Liberal democracy requires participation and consent, and as long as American military power is the prime tool for building it, Muslims around the world are unlikely to change their ideas. We need to decouple America and the promotion of democracy; the Iraq war did the opposite." Ignatieff does even better in this piece, where he writes:

"I supported an administration whose intentions I didn't trust, believing that the consequences would repay the gamble. Now I realize that intentions do shape consequences. An administration that cared more genuinely about human rights would have understood that you can't have human rights without order and that you can't have order once victory is won if planning for an invasion is divorced from planning for an occupation....The administration, which never tires of telling us that hope is not a plan, had only hope for a plan in Iraq. Hope got in the way of straight thinking, but so did fantasy: that the Shiites, whom George H.W. Bush told to rise up in 1991, only to stand by and watch them be massacred, would greet their erstwhile betrayers as liberators; that a privileged Sunni minority would enthusiastically adapt to permanent minority status in a Shiite Iraq. When fantasy drives planning, chaos results....All interventions entail some element of illusion, but if intervening requires this quantity of illusion for an administration to be willing to risk it, we should be doing less intervening in the future."

In the meantime, as every serious person knows, we have to ask ourselves the question of what is to be done. There are, of course, numerous plans and agendas out there (including John Kerry's, or at least the one which appears under his byline), any and all of which can be more productively discussed by people more knowledgeable than me. All of the plans I prefer depend, to a certain degree, on getting people with a different perspective on things in charge of the occupation, which means getting some new leadership in Washington. But that may not (tell the truth: probably won't) happen. And in that spirit, I have to point out this wonderful post which has its own, entirely different and legitimate take on things. Noah Millman, a Republican who supported the war, looks at things--and Bush's prospects--this way:

"Bush is going to present us with a choice in the next election between a guy with basically the right orientation in terms of how to prosecute this war but a severely limited grasp of the complications of the real world and, worse, a basic refusal to admit that he or his team has ever made a mistake, or to learn from same; and, on the other hand, a guy who shows every sign of being an intelligent, sophisticated, informed guy with absolutely no political courage, who has never made a difficult political decision and has spent 19 years in the Senate compiling a record so thin as to be nonexistent. If you think that absolutely no tough decisions need to be made in the next four years, vote Kerry. If you think good values are all you need, and information is irrelevant to making the tough decisions that we will face, then vote Bush. If you think we'll have tough decisions to make, but you'd like them made by an informed and savvy person, then you--we--have a problem."

His solution (which he admits Bush will not adopt)? Fire someone. Someone important, someone who can be plausibly credited with the screw-ups in Iraq, someone whose departure will signal, at least to those like Noah who really, really want Bush to fulfill the tasks he has set for himself, that Bush is capable to adapting to reality and going forward. As he puts it:

"It would have to be someone very senior. Firing a guy like Wolfowitz or Feith wouldn't cut it. The point is not to purge the Administration of neo-cons, and anyhow these guys don't make the decisions; their bosses do. There are only 5 players senior enough and important enough to the war that their departure would be noted and weighed as significant. They are: Powell, Rice, Tenet, Rumsfeld, and Cheney."

Who does he believe ought to get the axe? Cheney. Why? Read it and see. I agree couldn't agree with him more (but then, I've wanted Cheney gone for a while now).

2004-04-13T11:47:00.000-05:00

Even More on Europe and Islam

Via Crooked Timber (who picked it up from Scott Martens at A Fistful of Euros), comes this excellent, long article by Randy McDonald on Muslim immigration and birthrate trends in France and other European countries, and what they suggest for the cultural future of Europe. There's a tremendous amount of intriguing material in his post, especially for someone like myself who is interested in the "interesting questions" of culture, language, identity, and civilization. He gives insight into varieties of Muslim immigration (from Algeria, Turkey, etc.), levels of Muslim religious devotion in comparison to Christian religiosity, sets up comparisons with French Catholic assimilation into mainstream Canadian culture, and much more. His overall conclusion:

"France's problem with its nominally Muslim minority in the early 21st century isn't a civilizational clash, any more than the United States' problem with its nominally Catholic minority in the early 20th century was. The French problem isn't whether or not it will be a Western country, or a democratic country, in a half-century. The French problem is how a large immigrant population, already fairly highly assimilated in the cultural sense but concentrated in certain immigrant ghettos where assimilation in the socioeconomic sense is more problematic, will be integrated into itself. There's no particular reason to think it will fail, given France?s own past immigration successes; there's also no reason for complacency, given France?s problems with youth and immigrant employment, and with social exclusion. It's a touchy situation, but like graduate school it's far more difficult to fail than it is to muddle through and succeed. There's certainly no reason for ridiculous fantasies. Now, on to issues worth real debate, like how to best integrate French Muslims into wider French society."

Point taken. Still, I wonder how well Randy believes the "issues worth real debate" can be addressed unless one thinks conceptually and culturally about integration. How will the "societal culture," to use Will Kymlicka's term, evolve as the preferences of its participants change, and to what extent will those preferences result in the collapse of former civic values and institutions in favor of others, and how would one internalize those costs? By the same token, given that civic values and institutions are premised upon and are embedded within linguistic, religious, and historical frameworks, how will changes in preferred language use, religious observance, and historical perspectives by the population at large (or various influential minority groupings within it) actually open up public possibilities that were inconceivable in the midst of the prior societal matrix? Perhaps most importantly, how will the political compromises and reactions to this process interfere with either the preservation of the old or the continuation on to the new? (These are by no means hysterical or irrelevant questions; as I've written before in connection with the debate over headscarves in France, the current controversy and overreaction of French authorities is a revealing guide to understanding the way in which the existing French commitment to "secularism" does not, in fact, serve their own identity well.) In short, not all of those who think provocatively about Islam and Europe are indulging in paranoid fantasies about civilizational clashes; some of them are quite willing to imagine a variety of possible outcomes, ranging from a "creeping Islamicization of a decadent Christendom" to a "backlash against immigration by the economically Neanderthal right" to a "happy fusion between rapidly secularized second-generation Muslims and their post-Christian neighbors," and want to think hard about the long-term requirements and consequences of each.

It is also worth injecting questions about modernity into the mix. Randy observes that, when confronted with immigration, assimilation, and resistance, in the long wrong culture will not hold: "people will defect entirely; people will disagree with your goals; people will choose to fold in on themselves....human beings show an unerring tendency to leave restrictive cultures for more pluralistic ones." This may very well be true; certainly Randy supports his contention with a great deal of data, drawn from a variety of contexts. Still, it brings one to think about Benjamin Barber's old (and yet continually being refined and demonstrated) "Jihad vs. McWorld" thesis--is the assimilation which takes place when people enter a more "pluralistic" context really an embrace of (and, of course, an adaptation to and of) the culture of pluralism, or is simply an appropriation of the technologies of modernity (both material and social) by way of maintaining, even empowering, one's alienation from the same? That is, is modern pluralism, and its association with democratic government and egalitarian respect, a cultural and historical achievement that those who enter into it from their own social spaces can internalize and be enriched by, or is it simply a neutral process, a scheme of markets and rights, that we can only hope will work out in more or less democratic and egalitarian directions? If the former (and Barber and many other serious thinker will tell you that it is), then wondering about how one best ushers in a 21st-century Europe with a significant Muslim population cannot simply be a matter of trusting inner logic of demographics and economic choice; there has to be affirmative, culturally informed acts of both inclusion and maintenance. (Which, again, is why the headscarf debate is about a lot more than simply educational policy in France. The receptivity of an unfortunate number of Muslims in Spain to such fundamentalist thinking is also relevant.) Which is not to say that Randy's claims aren't valid; they are. It is merely to say that his data helps us get a better and more accurate grasp on the "interesting questions," not that such questions are entirely laid to rest.

2004-04-12T22:40:00.000-05:00

Easter Monday--the Holiday, and the World's Latest Movie Review

(Interesting how in English the word "latest" can mean both "most late" and "most recent." I can't think of any other term that works though--"most delayed" would imply that I started on this a long time ago and only just now completed it, while "oldest" would mean that it's been laying around unpublished for ages. So "latest" it is. But first, Easter.)

I liked Laura's reflections on the Easter holiday, past and present. We're more like her sister than her: we're hugely into holidays and all their trappings around here. Both Melissa and I really delight in ritual, traditions, and a calendar oriented around expected and meaningful events, whether that meaning be profound (Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving) or rather silly (we celebrate King Kamehameha Day in June, mainly because it gives us an excuse to listen to our inexplicably large collection of Hawai'ian folk and guitar music). I have to report, though, that Easter is particularly stressful around the Fox household, because aside from a pretty regular dinner menu, we don't do anything which involves decorating, candy, or gifts. I have nothing against pagan traditions as such (I mean, they're so much fun!), it's just that...well, unlike Christmas and the Nativity and Santa Claus (who exists, mind you), somehow we could never find a way to bring all the varied elements of the Easter holiday together into a coherent whole; bunnies and chicks and all the rest seemed, to our mind at least, to interfere with keeping Christ's sacrifice and resurrection in its central place. So, soon after we married, Melissa and I decided that we'd just move the whole thing to May Day (see, I told you we don't have anything against paganism (or revolutionary worker's movements, for that matter)). Not that we forbid our daughters from participating in the holiday; if there's an Easter egg hunt at the church on Saturday we happily contribute, and we have children's stories about the Easter bunny and so forth. But basically, we keep Easter Sunday separate from all that, and don't break out the decorations until well after most other families have taken theirs down. The girls seem to understand. Besides, I think they feel that coloring "spring eggs," and finding chocolate bunnies (bought on a discount the day after Easter) in their May Day baskets when they wake-up on May 1, is something special and unique--and therefore meaningful, in a way which brings our family closer together. Which is one of the main points of holiday rituals after all.

***

I finally saw The Passion of the Christ. I went to a 10pm showing on Easter Eve, after the girls were asleep and Melissa had hit the sack. (I rarely go see movies on my own, for one reason or another. If it's something Melissa doesn't want to see--and that's not infrequently the case--I generally just wait until it's out on dvd or video.) There's no need to rehearse all that has already been said about the film; I found it astonishingly violent, disturbing, occasionally awe-inspiring, in some ways crude, its intensity sometimes organic but just as often forced. Not nearly as perverse an exercise, I thought, as many critics claimed, but not nearly as powerful as many others testified.

Upon reflection, my uneven reaction to the movie clearly originates with the way Mel Gibson, Jim Caviezel, Benedict Fitzgerald, et al, chose to present the scourging of Jesus. Everyone who cares to know has either seen for themselves or long since heard how ugly and grisly this extended sequence is. My issues with the film, however, arise not with the scourging per se, but with the visual consequences of it. Jesus is left a shredded, pulpy, oozing piece of meat after the Romans are done with him; he is, literally, unrecognizable. And from that point on, I had enormous difficulty getting into the movie, its message or drama or mood, because every time the camera focused on Jesus, I couldn't help but think: "How is that carcass walking?" It was an enormous distraction, and a discomforting one (like how you try to tear your eyes away from a traffic accident, but can't). Which is really too bad, because I think the first 45 minutes or so of the film demonstrated that Gibson and his collaborators had strong grip on the material. The Satan figure was frightening and subtle; the Gethsemane sequence, though allowing more than a few Hollywood conventions (the mist, the moody music, the slow motion scenes), was gripping in a quiet and very persuasive way. Before the walking corpse of Christ came to dominate every scene, you had some nice character moments: Peter, James and John and all their varied reactions (defiant, terrified, heartbroken, filled with self-loathing and doubt); the showy, blustering, more-macho-than-real Jewish guards; the Roman soldiers alternating between cool superiority, raging annoyance, and efficient violence. Even the Jewish council was, I think, a wonderful bit of filmmaking, with quick and telling lines of dialogue that gave you a real sense of both foreboding as well as the ambiguity of events. I didn't think anything was played in a heavy-handed way (not even the demonic persecution and ultimate suicide of Judas; I thought all the elements of those scenes--the children chasing him, the flies, the maggots--were Gibson's quite effective way of getting inside Judas's head) up until the scourging. And even afterwards, there was good work and some great scenes (I loved the teardrop/raindrop falling from heaven, as well as Satan's hysterical, defeated howl). But despite the good work I just couldn't take much out of it; I was too busy staring at Jesus's repulsive, sliced-open wreck of a body for any of these scenes to really work on me as they were supposed to. (Indeed, I think the only moments which could legitimately be described as anti-Semitic came in scenes after the scourging; whereas previously there was some diversity in how Gibson presented the Jewish authorities, it was just too easy, for me at least, to make the leap from "motivated by genuine religious zeal" to "motivated by pure Satanic blood-lust" once the priests were shown as continuing to call for Jesus's crucifixion even after being confronted with his ruined body.)

Obviously Gibson and his team knew what they were doing; why did they do it this way? Maybe this just shows how much of my Mormonism incorporates a kind of "empty-cross" Protestantism; maybe for a Roman Catholic like Gibson, the meaning of the plenitude of Christ's blood is plain enough. I spoke to a colleague of mine about it this morning; he suggested that the larger point of Gibson's aesthetic choices was the idea that Jesus simply would not, could not, die until He willed it; that as God, His defeat and death would only come, no matter what the agony, when He consented to it. I suppose that's one message. But out of the final hour of the film, I think there was only one time where Gibson's aesthetic vision actually pulled me in and made me think what I was seeing on its own terms. It came when the Roman soldiers turned Jesus's cross over parallel to the ground, so to beat down the spikes they've just hammered through his feet and hands; there is a great, dull thud, and we see a horrifying jolt of pain shake the ripped and beaten body of the Christ, now suspended about a foot above the ground. Blood dribbles from his body and onto the ground, flayed strips of flesh dangle loosely in the air; his arm has been stretched and dislocated, and we can see a patch of his ribs where skin and muscle have been completely torn away. It made me think of butchering animals, cutting them up into meat and skin and bones, and hanging them up on hooks. It made me think of a slaughterhouse. And that, of course, is not irrelevant to the story of Jesus. Christ, we are told, was the Lamb who meekly went to be slaughtered. If there was not a reason for Him to go through such horror, to receive such a thorough death-dealing, then presumably that symbol--of an animal whose blood is shed and then is dismembered--would never have been given. But it was; He was, the prophets tell us again and again, the Lamb, the scapegoat, the sacrifice on the altar. So I'll give Gibson that much, for whatever it's worth. (I should note that a friend of mine, a convert to Catholicism, thinks my comments here make sense of what I described being distracted by in the previous paragraph. Perhaps--but even if what I was distracted by can be made sensible in my mind, that doesn't mean it still wasn't distracting. So, whatever the quality and efficacy of the film's message, I think we at least agree that it's execution was flawed.)

Apparently, my Easter weekend viewing of the film not only put The Passion back on top in terms of box office, but helped it become, as of now, the 8th highest grossing movie of all time, and still going strong. Clearly, unless some summer blockbuster shatters all expectations, it will be the highest grossing film of the year. It'll be interesting to see how Hollywood acknowledges (or doesn't acknowledge) it at next year's Academy Awards.

Update: My old friend Matt Stannard has, partly in response to the above comments, put up on his blog a reflective and insightful defense of The Last Temptation of Christ as a far superior movie to The Passion. I've never seen Last Temptation, though I'm pretty familiar with many of the traditionalist criticisms made of the film's attempt to present Jesus as an "imperfect, self-conscious man," as Matt puts it. (I've also heard a lot of crummy things about the casting as well.) Matt makes me want to see it though; in his view, the great power of the film's telling of the story is its presentation of Jesus's choice to reject "the mundane," the world of compromise and small victories and everyday joy, in the name of transcendent hope. (Moreover, he even uses an article from First Things to make his point!) So now that I've finally seen The Passion, Last Temptation takes its place on my "to-see" list.

2004-04-09T10:43:00.000-05:00

Good Friday--Bitter Journey

Many of you have seen this before; Beliefnet first made it available on their website back in 1999. But if you haven't, take the time (even if you only have a dial-up connection) to load and watch this powerful multimedia feature, "Bitter Journey: The Way of the Cross". Not only is it haunting, but it carefully distills Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant liturgies and referents to the Passion into a powerful, unified message: one of pain, and gratitude, and humility, and awe, at Christ's death for our sake.

2004-04-08T13:51:00.000-05:00

Playing Catch-Up

It's been a busy week--I went out to Chicago for a job interview, and I've spent a good part of my work days helping out students with their papers, meaning less time at the office to get everything else done. Plus Easter is coming up, and there's a lot I need to finish up before the holiday (for my own mental and spiritual health, if not for any other reason). So rather than giving any of the following the sort of attention they deserve, let me just link to them, with a few comments:

Months ago, I wrote on the effort of Governor Bob Riley of Alabama to inject some Christian social justice concerns into his state's tax code. That effort was a failure, but the ideas and inspiration behind the governor's actions live on. Now, in the most recent issue of Dissent, Stephen L. Newman defends Governor Riley from a different direction: against secular liberals who tended to "regard Riley's biblically inspired case for tax reform with suspicion" solely because it was biblically inspired. Newman goes on to dissect the liberal hostility to public arguments which do not fit the criteria of "public reason": that is, "one[s] that can be affirmed by all citizens, whatever their conception of the good." He criticizes this Rawlsian obsession with "neutral" reasoning; distinguishing between motivations and ends, Newman argues that "so long as the policy objective is within the scope of the state's authority, its sponsors' motives are irrelevant....So long as Christians and liberal secularists hold the end [in this case, a concern for the tax code] in common, and so long as what is proposed constitutes a legitimate governmental objective, it hardly matters that [these groups would] defend it in completely different ways." This is, as one might expect, a huge argument among political and legal theorists, and Newman isn't saying anything especially new here (see Michael Perry, Stephen Carter, David Smolin, and quite a few others), but that hardly undermines the important point he makes. It should go without saying, of course, that I basically agree with him.

Some people are under the impression that I'm a defender of Samuel Huntington and all he stands for; I'm not. I've been more than adequately convinced that Huntington's arguments supporting his thesis about the uniqueness of Hispanic immigration are flawed and even myopic. But that still doesn't change the fact that Huntington is willing to think about what it means to be a civilization, and what it means to be a nation; however clumsy or borderline xenophobic his thinking, he at least must be given credit for considering the nature and dynamics of identity-construction and maintenance, and what that may or may not mean for economic and social policy. In this article, also derived from his forthcoming book, Huntington further elaborates on what he understands to be the requirements (culturally, linguistically, religiously, and so forth) on preserving the "national" character of American society, as opposed to the cosmopolitan or imperial options presented by the left and the right. Is it "conservative" to even hypothetically consider such requirements? If so, then I have to say that, at the very least, "conservatives" of this sort seem to be ones uniquely able to ask truly interesting questions. And without such questions, I wonder if important considerations of population, assimilation, and language can even be properly grasped, much less coherently dealt with.

Finally, I have to announce the existence of a wonderful blogger I just discovered yesterday: Hugo Schwyzer. He describes himself as a "progressive, consistent-life ethic Anabaptist Democrat"--that is, he pro-life and pro-union, a Christian who takes social justice and moral order equally seriously. I found myself in near-total agreement with his many posts as I read through them; this one in particular, on sex, shame, and the plastic surgery women submit themselves to for the sake of social approval, is a must read.

2004-04-01T13:18:00.000-06:00

Regarding Authoritarianism

Matt Ygelsias has been reflecting on authoritarianism, here, here, and here. The main focus of his reflections is Singapore, an avowedly authoritarian society that, for a variety of reasons (such as the fact that malpractice lawsuits are practically unheard of) is able to provide excellent services to its residents, as Belle Waring attests. In his last post, riffing off some points that the Blogtheist makes, Matt goes on to consider Pinochet and his ability to impose, by fiat, old age pensions. Matt's many commenters, when not expressing incredulity, have additionally pointed out the excellence of the Nazi-build autobahn as an additional example.

The difficulty of dealing with long-term or complicated problems in need of fundamental reform, especially in democratic contexts where there are numerous veto points, many turf-protecting stakeholders, etc., has long been a problematic one for political thinkers. Many try to avoid it by simply avoiding pluralism altogether: the sovereign, in these conceptions, ultimately has no obligation to recognizing a diversity of interests. Yet even then the realities of government, and the specificity of political action, is going to create factions, which will entrench themselves and need to be dealt with, particularly in times of crisis. (Even Rousseau, who argued that the only legitimate and free society would be one small enough so that all the members could unite around a single "general will" and therefore be sovereigns in their own collective right, still allowed that sometimes, when real emergencies arose, a "dictator" would be necessary to do what the general assembly couldn't.) The lure of violence, of simply getting rid of the obstacles which real diverse persons present, is a difficult one. (You can see it creeping into the rhetoric of liberty on many levels, whether that rhetoric be about the "liberation" of individuals from oppressive relationships or about the "emancipation" which the free market presumably supplies.)

My own observation about the Singaporean context, which needs to be clearly understood, is that an authoritarianism that "works"--that doesn't, for example, have the hideous costs which a dictator like Pinochet or Hitler had for the people of Chile or Germany--isn't going to merely be a matter of crushing factions; it is going to be something which involves the recognition and maintenance of a cultural context wherein "factions" understand their role differently. In other words, where a certain social uniformity or collectivity holds for all or practically all members (or at least franchised and economically empowered members) of the society, and hence they express their particularity with an eye towards a common good. Michael Robinson, in Matt's comments section, argues that the strong technocratic bureaucracy in Singapore is explicable by recognizing that it is "extracted from a 2000-year tradition of Confucian governance," one built around the moral authority of sages who promulgated a "mandate of heaven". I wouldn't necessarily argue that every Singaporean doctor or patient feels themselves bound to a Confucian moral order--one wherein which malpractice lawsuits would imply an antagonistic rather than a shared relationship to the goods at hand--but it pointless to speculate about how Singapore manages to keep health care costs down and the quality so high without at least contemplating the role of cultural homogeneity and communal identity in smoothing out the many ways in which individuals might otherwise drive up costs by seeing themselves as disconnected to some larger moral imperative.

Obviously, in many ways the Singapore which Lee Kwan Yew created is a less than admirable society; I've written plenty on the "Asian values" debate before, and I'm hardly a defender of Confucian authoritarianism, which can be just as persuasively attacked from a culturally communitarian perspective as from any other. But basically, given my particular kind of left-communitarian politics, I'm not unsympathetic to the project of reconnecting people to such identities and such imperatives (hence my interest in language, religion, nationality, etc.)--especially, as is at least arguably the case in Singapore, when the collective goods and cultural imperatives which the government works to embody (admittedly sometimes harshly in the Singaporean case) in fact have popular grounding support. (Imposing "shared values" where none exist and none are wanted would of course be the worst kind of tyranny.) If Matt, for whatever reason, is willing to speculate in a contrary way on the whys and wherefores of authoritarianism, more power to him. I don't care to turn liberalism into a be-all and end-all fetish, like "dellis" and some other of Matt's commenters do ("for you and your ugly kin, it's all about democracy, and basic liberalism is hardly ever mentioned")--as far as I'm concerned, liberalism shouldn't necessarily be accepted as a basic first-order rule of society; better to view it as an adjective, a way of acting within the given context of society. And if that society is authoritarian, even "illiberal" in some of its shared values, that doesn't mean that the support for the goods which those values at least partially make possible (like an efficient, affordable, and excellent health care system) is inauthentic; the popular acclaim for such achievements (such as that clearly manifest by a grateful Belle and her husband John) deserves cautious democratic credit as well.

2004-03-31T09:39:00.000-06:00

Wolfe on Schmittian Conservatism and American Liberalism

Via A&L Daily, I ran across this article by Alan Wolfe on how the writings of Carl Schmitt, the notorious fascist (or at least quasi-fascist) philosopher of "the political," can provide insight into the mindset of contemporary conservatives. There are some interesting tidbits in the essay (I knew, for example, that Schmitt has attracted the attention of the anti-liberal left over the last few decades--Tracy B. Strong's introductory essay to this edition of The Concept of the Political is a good guide to the Schmittian revival--but Wolfe places it in a helpful Foucauldian context), but much of it is simply facile. Basically, Wolfe takes up Schmitt's claim that politics can never truly be "liberal" in order to explain why conservatives generally get so nasty, and moreover, generally win political fights:

"Schmitt had an explanation for why conservative talk-show hosts like Bill O'Reilly fight for their ideas with much more aggressive self-certainty than, say, a hopeless liberal like Alan Wolfe....Liberals believe in the possibility of neutral rules that can mediate between conflicting positions, but to Schmitt there is no such neutrality, since any rule -- even an ostensibly fair one -- merely represents the victory of one political faction over another....Liberals insist that there exists something called society independent of the state, but Schmitt believed that pluralism is an illusion because no real state would ever allow other forces, like the family or the church, to contest its power. Liberals, in a word, are uncomfortable around power, and, because they are, they criticize politics more than they engage in it....[I]f Schmitt is right, conservatives win nearly all of their political battles with liberals because they are the only force in America that is truly political. From the 2000 presidential election to Congressional redistricting in Texas to the methods used to pass Medicare reform, conservatives like Tom DeLay and Karl Rove have indeed triumphed because they have left the impression that nothing will stop them. Liberals cannot do that."

I'm neither a Schmittian nor a conservative (at least not in the partisan sense that Wolfe uses the term), but I think this is more than a little tendentious. Why it sounds that way comes through later in the article, when he's talking about American liberalism:

"John Locke, not Thomas Hobbes, was the reigning social-contract theorist of the American experience. Our tradition owes more to Montesquieu than to Machiavelli....Liberal to its very core, the United States has never been as attracted to the realpolitik tradition in political thought as the Germans....To the degree that conservatives bring to this country something like Schmitt's friend-enemy distinction, they stand against not only liberals but America's historic liberal heritage. That may help them in the short run; conservative slash-and-burn rhetoric and no-holds-barred partisanship are so unusual in our moderately consensual political system that they have recently gotten far out of the sheer element of surprise, leaving the news media without a vocabulary for describing their ruthlessness and liberals without a strategy for stopping their designs. But the same extremist approach to politics could also harm them if a traditional American concern with checks and balances and limits on political power comes back into fashion."

Wolfe may be right, but if so, it isn't because this essay presents any real coherent engagement with Schmitt. Think about it: is Wolfe saying that Schmitt is wrong? If so, then the Schmittian explanation for why conservatives have been successful is flawed; while there might be something to the idea that contemporary conservative partisanship is relatively new under the sun (though I doubt it; if anything, it's a throwback to the elections of the pre-Progressive era), it can't be a matter of the GOP having realized and exploited the inner failings of the liberal ideology. Then again, is Wolfe saying that Schmitt may be right about the nature of the political realm? If so, then the conservative factions he condemns may not be in violation of American liberalism, but merely have shown up its weaknesses. Wolfe should not simply assume that America's "liberal character" can so obviously provide a counter-example to Schmittian analysis; after all, Schmitt could point to "liberal" America's crushing of this continent's indigenous population, its enslavement of African slaves, its wars with Mexico and Spain, the bloody contests on the frontier and the even bloodier struggles between labor and business well into the 20th century, to support his thesis: that is, Schmitt could claim that America's liberal "constitutional faith," with all its checks and balances and concerns with civil society, seemed triumphant only because it wasn't, actually, all that plural or all that liberal. In fact, one could employ Schmittian analysis to explain the rise of the contemporary right by showing how it was a reaction to the apotheosis of the "liberal consensus" following WWII and, especially, the civil rights movement--the moment when, Schmitt might say, all enemies seemed vanquished, and new ones were needed.

Anyway, I don't think Schmitt is a good guide to political thinking, period. Which means, as interesting as Wolfe's essay may be, he doesn't provide a particularly coherent polemical stick to bash one's opponents with either.

2004-03-30T13:44:00.000-06:00

Democracy, Temporality, and Legitimacy

The most recent issue of the American Political Science Review (February 2004) includes an essay that I haven't seen any other the many political theory and science bloggers I read regularly mention yet, so I thought I'd discuss it here, since APSR's content isn't available online, and this essay is really one that deserves a wide readership. It's by Harvard professor Dennis F. Thompson, and titled "Election Time: Normative Implications of Temporal Properties of the Electoral Process in the United States." Not a thrilling title, to be sure, but the essay develops a framework for thinking about and linking together some of the most important and necessary political reforms in the U.S. today. Basically, Professor Thompson shows how gerrymandering, recall elections, exit polls, unrestricted campaign donations, absentee ballots and much more all challenge the legitimacy of our democratic process, by way of emphasizing the temporal requirements of democracy. It is important, he argues, that the particular moment of voting--"election time," as he puts it--be respected and cultivated, or else the process itself can be undermined. I've never been much of a "good-government" reformer (though California's recall election annoyed me to no end), but this article alone may make a zealot out of me.

Thompson breaks election time into three "temporal properties: periodicity (the intervals at which citizens vote), simultaneity (the range of time in which citizens vote), and finality (the extent to which the result of their votes is conclusive until the next election)." As he writes: "All three [properties] support popular sovereignty--the capacity of majorities to control government--in different but related ways. Because elections take place periodically, current majorities can overcome the dead hand of past majorities. To the extent that voting takes place simultaneously, elections express the will of a determinate majority rather than the preferences of a series of different majorities. Because elections produce final results, they legitimate the authority of a current majority until the next election....[O]ther democratic values, such as fairness and civic engagement, are also strengthened to the extent that the electoral process realizes these temporal properties." (I recognize that various political thinkers--Rousseau and Burke for example--would have numerous different reasons to question the Lockean social contract which Thompson implicitly endorses here as part of his test of legitimacy, but for the purposes talking about reforms in the American polity, I think we can set those criticisms aside.)

Thompson goes on to list certain "anomalies" which he think violate one or more of these properties, and why properly reforming a system challenged by these particular anomalies requires viewing the problem from within a temporal framework. For example, gerrymandering. It is widely recognized that the politicized drawing and redrawing of congressional districts--most recently associated with Texas Republicans, but of course going much further back than that, into the murky racial redistricting of the 1970s and 80s--has reached a constitutional crisis point. However, most of the basic arguments against the fundamentally undemocratic practice of giving elected representatives the power to define the electorate for voting purposes fail in one way or another. Thompson ticks them off: redistricting should be an objective procedural process, requiring random distribution? But that would undermine the ability of representative government to embody and reflect localized sentiments and preferences. Redistricting should create perfectly competitive districts? But that makes competition an end in itself, and maximizing competition in a democracy assumes that the work of representation is best understood as a utilitarian, market-based phenomenon. Partisan redistricting undermines accountability? But that ignores that fact that "even representatives in safe seats generally act as if their re-election is in doubt and therefore tend to be responsive to their constituents."

The truly conclusive argument against our current gerrymandering regime, Thompson feels, is that "elections are not one-time events....Each election, thought a discrete event, stands in an indefinite series....[Therefore, periodicity] provides the means by which present majorities can escape the dead hand of past majorities." To the extent which present practices of redistricting make the drawing of electoral boundaries an arbitrary, irregular process, going through unpredictable contortions or settling into near-permanency depending on the vicissitudes of party politics, then that periodicity--the reliable and legitimating process by which citizens may feel their views and the changes in such adequately internalized through electoral mechanisms--is lost. Invoking Madison's claim that "we can trust the normal process of representation...provided that the issue under consideration is one in which representatives share a common interest with their constituents," Thompson concludes that "the value of periodicity combined with the Madisonian principle implies that the authority for governing elections in general and redistricting in particular should be located outside the ordinary legislative process." He suggests that independent commissions, which have had long success in streamlining and therefore preserving the periodicity of the democratic process in Australia and Canada, not to mention in several states, shows us an obvious route to reform.

This is just the first third of the article. Thompson then goes on to show the negative consequences for democratic temporality posed by numerous other "anomalies." Regarding exit polls, Thompson is highly critical, particularly in connection with national elections. By making information available to later voters (for example, those in California) that was not available to earlier voters (those in New Hampshire), exit polls undermine the useful civic presumption that everyone is voting "more or less at the same time," therefore creating an impression (and arguably the fact) of unfairness, with certain voters having been excluded from the projection of a "more coherent popular sovereign." (Think about it this way: the election which Florida voters participated in was, in a very real way, different from the one which California voters participated in, to the extent that the latter voters went to the polls aware that Florida had already descended into chaos.) It is important for the sake of continued civic trust in our democracy, Thompson insists, for citizens to "vote at the same time...[and] make their choices with equal access to relevant information." Obviously, this argument is even more critical of the extended use of absentee balloting and early voting for the sake of convenience; while there are important concerns for fairness that make such exceptions to the rule of simultaneity necessary (providing for invalids or the elderly, overseas or military voters, etc.), it is certainly not something that should be encouraged, especially when the data (as Thompson shows) doesn't show turn-out increasing in any significant way in states which have made extensive use of absentee ballots or online voting. (In my usual populist/communitarian/traditionalist way, I would have liked it if Thompson had made more explicit the challenge which absentee ballots and "e-voting" pose to the civic ritual of casting ballots, and the public sphere that act helps sustain; but others have made the argument well, and it's clearly implied by Thompson regardless.) And then there is Thompson's case for campaign regulation, both financial and otherwise. Leaping over many dead-end arguments about the financing and directing of campaign expenditures and strategies, with the goal of generating more participation and less wearying echo-chamber-type spin and mudslinging, Thompson points out that the rules must be different for electoral and nonelectoral politics, because the former must be characterized by finality, meaning that legitimate elections must "come to a definite conclusion at a foreseeable time...which until the next elections marks an end to the process of deciding who will hold office." Political advocacy may be permanent, but campaign advocacy is not, and should not be. Thompson acknowledges that his argument only provides a "normative basis" for justifying strict regulation of electoral politics, not a criterion for distinguishing which regulations will adequately fulfill that purpose; to a certain degree, any sort of limit or directive imposed on the spending or collection of campaign donations, or the organization of debates, or the conduct of the candidates, is going to be arbitrary. Yet, he concludes, such acts need not be "objectionably arbitrary if they represent a good faith effort to capture...the principled difference between electoral and ordinary politics."

This has been a long post, I know (though not as long as some goo-goo posts I've read); I doubt many who aren't fans of Dennis Thompson will have made it to the end. But I just find it so interesting think about politics through the frame Thompson has provided, by way of the temporal "rhythm" of electoral politics. Time matters; it matters to how we conduct ourselves in the world, and thus matters significantly to what we do, individually and collectively, as citizens of a polity. Thompson's essay thus makes meaningful an aspect of political life I hadn't though much about before, and by so doing has given, in my view at least, a lot of long-proposed and reasonable reforms a new urgency and relevance. So find go call up any political scientist you happen to be acquainted with, and have them fax you a copy of Thompson's article--that, or go buy the latest copy of APSR yourself. You'll be glad you did.

2004-03-28T09:38:00.000-06:00

Supporting Families, Sustaining the Nation

Matthew Yglesias, describing me as a "left-traditionalist" (why didn't I think of that? it's perfect!), brings up a subject that he correctly infers I am fairly interested in, and which, as far as I can tell, has practically zero support among his blog's regular readers--the problem of population decline in Western nations. Matt makes the, I think, very reasonable argument that nations--especially relatively successful, democratic and egalitarian ones--concerned with preserving their economy and polity ought to take action to reduce the costs of child-bearing and child-rearing; that is, employing "socialist means" to achieve "conservative ends." He cites this excellent article in the Washington Monthly on the real costs--in terms of social insurance, job growth, tax revenue, and so forth--of allowing a nation's population to actually fall below the replacement rate. I'm glad Matt brought the article to my attention; it's an excellent survey of some economic data that many "lifestyle liberals" would prefer to deny. (Though there's a lot more to the problematic economics of raising children in America today than the article touches on; for instance, it doesn't pay nearly enough attention to consequences of the two-income model of family life having become practically mandatory if one wants to be able to afford a home. See Laura for more details; her suggestions about actively recreating the middle-class "Levittown" communities of the past may seem nostalgic, but actually they fit right into exactly the sort of positive, family-friendly actions which Matt is suggesting we take seriously.)

Most of the comments to Matt's post suggest that the majority of his regular readers think that any concern about national/cultural/economic/political sustainability, and the relation such has to the family and child-rearing, is borderline racist and in any case profoundly conservative. I won't try to pick a fight with any or all of them; I'll just salute Matt's courage and open-mindedness. And then I'll do him a big favor, and associate his post with this article from First Things. (I'll bet that's the first time Matt and FT have ever been linked together.) But seriously--the author of this essay comes, from a thoroughly conservative perspective, to essentially the same conclusion as Matt: there is a real need, and a reasonable one, for society to act collectively on behalf of easing the social and economic costs of child-rearing in the modern world. Read it--and then, read the author's response to the many government-hating traditionalists who wrote in, angry that FT would print anything so "socialist." Strange bedfellows indeed!

2004-03-27T22:01:00.000-06:00

Update (More on Headscarves)

Discussion of the ban on wearing the hajib in French schools continues in the blogosphere. Peter Northrup has a nice summary and consideration of the arguments which Patrick Weil, a member of the commission which suggested the policy, makes in defense of criticisms of the ban. Weil's basically argues that the ban on headscarves and other "ostentatious" religious symbols was a result of the desire to protect female Muslim school students who preferred to go without headscarves from harassment and bullying by those (mostly male) students who believed they should wear them; Peter asks the obvious question: why not punish the bullies, then, as opposed to those Muslim girls who did choose to where the hajib? Jacob T. Levy is even less sympathetic to Weil than Peter. As I've written before, I'm in complete agreement with Peter and Jacob (and Scott Martens too) regarding this ban: it stinks. However, I think I have to side with Mark Kleiman when he criticizes the analogy which Jacob makes use of. Jacob writes:

"The following case seems straightforwardly analogous to me. The governor of a southern state circa 1960 has accepted the integration of the public schools, but refers to interracial dating by students as an assault against the state's values. A commission is convened, and finds that students involved in interracial dating are routinely threatened or beaten by other students. In sadness more than in anger, and in order to protect the victims, it recommends a ban on interracial dating--or at least on ostentatious displays of same, like holding hands in hallways--along with a number of other reforms to promote improved race relations. The governor does the obviously-expected thing, adopts the recommendation for the ban and ignores the rest."

Mark writes that he fails "to see the analogy between banning a behavior that is being repressed by violence [like interracial dating] and banning a behavior that is being enforced by violence [like wearing a headscarf]." For Jacob, the analogy holds because "in both cases, the wrong students [headscarf wearers and interracial daters] are getting coerced, and they're getting coerced under cover of their own protection by a government that openly wanted rid of the targeted behavior for reasons unrelated to the violence."

Generally speaking, I think Mark is correct in thinking that there is a not insignificant difference between banning an activity that is currently being subject to unjust repression and banning an activity which indirectly gives rise to opportunities for repression. The former would be directly giving into violence (you can't walk down that alleyway anymore; muggers lay in wait there); the latter is acknowledging and attempting to pre-emptively redress the conditions of violence (we're no longer allowing cities to build unlighted alleyways, because they become hide-outs for muggers; our apologies to those of you who really valued the thrill of walking down dark alleyways). Obviously, the best of all possible worlds is the world where there are no muggers in any alleyways, and where French schools lack any Muslim students willing to harass those who don't conform. Lacking that world, one can still make a distinction, I think, between decisions that are craven responses to violence and those that are concerned about the environment conducive to such.

Jacob wouldn't care for that answer, I suspect, because he probably would be made uncomfortable by all this "condition" talk. The fundamental matter in his view, very likely, is the simple fact of individual coercion in the name of some authoritatively determined standard. In his hypothetical, couldn't interracial dating fall afoul to "positive" concerns about the "environment" of the school just as easily as to simple complicity with bullying and blackmail? Indeed it could. But that's why I think, analogy or no analogy, it is insufficient to assess proposals like these simply in terms of the rights or choices or freedoms directly or "pre-emptively" lost; you also have to qualitatively assess the "authoritatively determined standard" which lurks behind the proposal. I oppose the headscarf ban not simply because it is a poorly conceived assault on the liberty of many French students, but because the laicized end-state which the French government clearly prefers is a crummy one. That is, not even the reasons "unrelated to the violence," as Jacob put it, stand up to good scrutiny here. So I agree with Jacob, though only partly because of the coercion of liberty involved; I am bothered at least as much, if not more, by the state's failure to conceive a proper fraternity as well.

2004-03-24T22:59:00.000-06:00

Back Again

Well, that was a longer break than I intended--and as often seems the case, the break was a mixed blessing: it was wonderful to step away from work and everyday life for a while, but that only makes it much more difficult, disorienting, and disagreeable to return to the daily grind. The jokes people tell about needing a vacation to recover from the vacation have a point. I suppose I'll be lucky if I can get back on top of things and get my act back together by Easter or thereabouts. I wish for a graceful life, and instead it's just a constant pattern of rush and recovery. But I guess that's hardly a unique complaint.

In the meantime, I've got a small backload of things to blog about. And if you were an Invisible Adjunct reader, get over there and wish her a fond farewell before it's too late; her decision to give up blogging has resulted in a torrent of tearful goodbyes, of which mine is just one of many. IA's blog was one of the sanest, funniest, most thoughtful sites around; she will be greatly missed.

2004-03-12T07:29:00.000-06:00

A Year of Blogging Enviously

My very first blog post appeared on March 18, 2003 (scroll down to read it here; thanks to the maddening complications of Blogger--which I complain about but which also, I admit, aren't quite enough to impel me to do the work necessary to switch over to something better--my permalinks for March don't work, and indeed, most of the first six months can't be accessed through the archives at all, though occasionally specific posts might be recovered if you have the link saved somewhere). So I'm jumping the gun a little in making this an anniversary post. But I'll be out of town all next week: it's ASU's spring break, and my younger sister is getting married on the 17th in Salt Lake City (indeed, she planned the wedding around our availability), so we're going to spend the next several days out West, visiting old friends in Utah and showing off Alison to relatives. Alison has gotten a lot better over the last few weeks--naps still elude us, but she's sleeping at night now, isn't backed up, and thus is a happier baby. I hope she and we survive the plane ride. Anyway, by the time we return it'll officially be spring, and this blog's one-year anniversary will have officially passed. Since I'm a calendar-conscious kind of guy, I decided this was a good time to take care of old business, and have everything ready for a fresh start for when we get back.

I could go into some detail about how my blog posts have evolved over the last twelve months, but I don't think there's much to say there. If this blog's content has had any real theme at all, it's been one of ideological and philosophical clarification: it's been a place for me to argue, with myself and others, about what I really believe, how those beliefs relate to current events and the history of thought, and whether those beliefs stand up to intellectual scrutiny. In short, I've mostly spent the last twelve months trying to figure out where I stand on this, that, or some other issue. In the beginning I mostly wrote about Iraq and imperialism and what kind "liberal" I am (a moderately nationalist, interventionist one); lately I've been writing more about the family and relationships and what kind of "communitarian" I am (a socially conservative yet egalitarian one). But fundamentally, it's all been about self-understanding, I suppose.

The thing is, such arguments, aiming for self-understanding, don't require a blog. For several months prior to beginning to blog, I'd had a pretty active e-mail discussion group going with a lot of old friends; we'd search the web and send links to each other every day, and argue about this and that. I treasure that list, and still do. Unfortunately, it's sometimes been difficult to maintain both those connections and this blog. So why do I do it? Well, there are lots of reasons....but the one which comes most readily to mind is, I'm sorry to say, envy.

By late 2002 and early 2003 I noticed more and more academics--people who are my peers--blogging. Jacob T. Levy, whose old site I got addicted to. Ditto for John Holbo. And many more: Kieran Healy, Chris Bertram...most of the Crooked Timber crowd, now that I think about it. Of course, many of these people started their blogs months before I'd ever even heard of such a thing, but given that I came to the internet quite late (I'm still not entirely clear on what "Usenet" was), I suppose I should be happy I discovered them at all. But I wasn't happy--or at least, not entirely. I'd love to say that I read their blogs wholly because I was stimulated by their ideas, and wanted to engage them in discussion, and it's true that I did. But I'd be lying if I didn't say that a good deal of my motivation for going back again and again was raw, self-interested anxiousness, something along the lines of: "Look at this! I've heard of that guy! I've read her articles! And now, everyone's reading what they say! I could have said that! Wait, I had that idea once! I studied that for years; you need my input! Dammit, I'm getting left behind!" And so forth. I was jealous, in other words. And not only jealous; some rather ugly Nietzschean ressentiment rumbled around in there as well: "Look at them. They're younger than me. They went to better graduate schools than I did. They have jobs at better universities than me. More people know them. They've got book deals. They're better writers, better scholars, better educated, more disciplined, more knowing, less distracted, wiser, hard-working. I hate them." Well, maybe it didn't get that far; at least I hope not. But perhaps I'm in denial.

Everyone knows that envy is an essential ingredient in the academy; indeed, on the publish-or-perish level, one might say that envy is built into the system, a feature inculcated into graduate students in order to get them to adhere to the economy of the place. It's something I've struggled with plenty over the years, especially in connection with my (seemingly never-ending) job search. In all honesty, I really don't think it's ever affected me very deeply, certainly not to the point of driving the life choices I make. But in the blogosphere, I must admit that the contrary is true: I have often been driven at least in part by envy. This blog and a great many of the posts I've written over the last year are significantly (if not, thankfully, entirely) the product of seeing some other blog, or some other post, and frustratingly feeling that it ought to have been said or done by me.

So there you go. Judge me accordingly. I'll be back in a week.

2004-03-11T00:35:00.000-06:00

Update (Huntington's Critics and Me)

My moderate defense of the perspective (if not the point) of Samuel Huntington's recent essay on Hispanic immigration and American culture attracted the attention of Matthew Yglesias, who wrote that I was "all wrong." More accurately, Matt thought I'd been conned by Huntington; that what I described as a "wealth of data" supporting Huntington's claim that "this particular wave of immigrants--both legal and illegal--is larger and different from all previous waves" is in fact nothing of the sort. Could be. As I wrote originally, and in a comment on Matt's blog, I'm in no position to evaluate his evidence. My interest in Huntington has nothing to do with his particular conclusions, which--even if they were supported by his data (and I'm willing to grant they may not be)--I think show a rather simplistic understanding of cultural identity and change. But at least Huntington is talking about such things; and while Matt is correct that "neither [David] Brooks nor I denied that it is important for immigrants and their descendents to learn English," neither of them appeared inclined to attribute much weight to the engagement with (cultural) particularity which language acquisition requires. To repeat: Huntington may be, indeed probably is, all washed up when he equates American identity with a simple "Anglo-Protestant" particularity....but in some ways, I'd rather any discussion of some particularity than no discussion at all. And that's what happens when you treat language--as Brooks, at least, appeared to--as just some neutral, interchangeable tool, just something that you pick up (or your kids pick up, or your grandkids) once what is really important--your "values"--inspire you to cross a border.

And speaking of those values, and that particularity, check out the fisking which Scott Martens has launched against Huntington over at Pedantry. Scott knows the data on language acquisition, and plans to tear to pieces Huntington's argument about the "uniqueness" of the current resistance by Hispanic immigrants to assimilation; but his first post is a broad, indignant attack on Huntington's "value-driven nationalism" and the culture in implicitly praises. Scott cuts right to the quick of Huntington's conception of America, writing with dark humor that he should begin by pointing out that "the American dream--hard work gets you a decent life--is almost completely mythical; that Anglo-Protestant values didn't build America nearly as much as the sweat of cheap immigrant labourers (first from Africa, then from Europe and now from Mexico); and that anglophone Protestants have been happily rejecting Anglo-Protestant values for quite a long time now and have been doing so far more vocally and threateningly than Mexicans ever have." He correctly observes that Huntington's conception is built upon a definitional fiat: he comes up with an Anglo-Protestant majority culture by excluding African-American slaves and Native Americans as from his measure of the American public. (Historically justified, perhaps, but nonetheless a stacking of the deck, allowing him to claim that what was, in truth, actively constructed was simply constituted by virtue of majority preference.) And I couldn't agree more with his dismissal of Huntington's Weberian association of American Protestantism with entrepreneurialism and individualism; as Scott puts it "America's religious dissenters--the Pilgrims, the Puritans, the refugee German churches, the Huguenots--were overwhelmingly organised into tightly-knit interdependent communities...the very opposite of self-reliant or individualistic."

Unfortunately, I do think some of Scott's ire gets in the way of his critique. He gets a little snide, wondering if believing "it's only a crime if you get caught" isn't a central American value as well (no, Scott, I suspect that's more "human" than anything else). He says the idea that Americans have long identified with "a duty to build 'heaven on earth'" is nonsensical, and quotes some selfish conservative pseudo-Christian to that effect--but of course, if that was the case (and if people such as the one he quotes really had defined our history), then the tremendous careers, reputation and influence of such "city on a hill"-type moral leaders as John Winthrop, Abraham Lincoln, or Martin Luther King would be inexplicable. And there are a few other things I disagree with as well. But all in all, a good fisking, and one that will continue. Check it out.

2004-03-10T22:57:00.000-06:00

Preview of a Pundit

An old friend of mine asked if I'd consider posting a short essay written by his son, which he is supposed to submit for publication somewhere as part of a school assignment. I guess blogs count. Anyway, I'm happy to post it here (frankly, it's better than a lot of stuff I've seen posted over at The Corner). Consider it a preview of a future pundit (he's certainly getting an earlier start than I did).

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"War- What is it Good For?"
by Christian Edwards van Muijen

Let's see; there's the War of Jenkins's Ear, the French-Indian War, the Revolutionary War, The Civil War, The Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, Operation Iraqi Freedom, and the War on Terror, just to name a few. Any kid in 7th grade can (hopefully) tell you that the US has been through our fair share of war and bloodshed. But through all of this you have to ask yourself 'Why? Why must we seek to destroy those who are standing in our way? Why must children cry from the pain of losing a loved one to an American weapon? What is war good for?'

The line from my Dad's song says that the answer to that question is 'absolutely nothing', but we of course know that that is not true. Without a war, there would be no United States of America. Without war, Hitler would control most of Europe, if not the whole world. The real question is 'Which war is a good war?'

The main way to discover whether a war is 'good' or 'bad' is to set up criteria for a 'just' war. The ones that I feel are most important are: 1. We must be defending our rights, 2. We must be defending the helpless from a known threat, and 3. There must be a force pressing almost equally, that is, the threat must be a real threat. If we are attacked by some new nation who are killing our people, that is a just time to go to war. If some nation is slaughtering people because of their ethnicity, that is a just war.

Even so, us 7th graders can feel the blow from any war, good or bad. Wars have their costs in an average area, like a school. Some students think that they shouldn't think by shutting off their minds and believe whatever ideas are thrown at them. Others are really just trying to hide from the fact that we are at war. Sadly, some students are segregated for their ethnicity when we go to war with their homelands. In fact, one of my good friends thought that it was World War III and we were going to war with India. Because of this, he was unkind to an Indian student in our school until we convinced him that WWIII hadn't occurred yet.

Going to war is not an easy thing to understand for my generation. With the Iraq war drawn to a close, most of us feel a quiet relief: No more violence, no more death, no more pain. The President says that the war was good and just, and we can just trust them. But the President's explanations don't really match up with our criteria. What was the point of going to Iraq? We went in there, looking for Weapons
of Mass Destruction, blew up some Iraqi citizens, and found... nothing. All the war proved was that George W. Bush wants to milk his title of "Commander-in-Chief" for all it's worth. If any of us folks in 7th grade have a problem, most of us can talk it out and find a better solution than going in and nuking anything that moves.

In conclusion, war is a complex and delicate matter. With many different perspectives to look at war through, there is no right way of describing a war. However, there are 'good' and 'bad' wars. I hope that we will have the wisdom to only fight 'good' wars in the future.

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I'd never even heard of the War of Jenkins's Ear before I read this essay, and I'm a college professor. So much for my junior high school education.

2004-03-05T09:38:00.000-06:00

Update (The Nanny Debate Continues)

The long, often contentious, but always interesting interblog debate on motherhood, nannies, domestic service, and exploitation--which I weighed in on here, here, and over at Times & Seasons here--has reared its head again, this time with a few interesting twists. Timothy Burke and Belle Waring both post some wonderful, revealing, reflections on domestic service and the exploitation question in non-U.S. contexts. Laura takes Tim's comments and uses them as a springboard to wonder about the relationship between a desire for "privacy" (the main reason Tim is uncomfortable with domestic service) and our discomforting unwillingness to get our own hands dirty. She asks: "Are we losing the ability to take care of ourselves? Are we losing some of the rugged individualism and self-sufficiency that de Tocqueville observed in our country 200 years ago?" Chun the Unavoidable has a pretty emphatic response: "If you're healthy, and someone else is cleaning your house, you need to check yourself." Oh, and Nate Oman gets all lawyerly, as is his right, about the meaning of "exploitation." Anyway, read and comment away.

2004-03-02T00:14:00.000-06:00

Great Acting

I'm hardly an expert when it comes to film, but I watch my share of movies, and like most people, I love talking about them. (No, I haven't seen The Passion of the Christ yet; for a variety of reasons, I rarely go out to see films without Melissa, and since she has no interest in seeing the movie--she knows she wouldn't handle the level of violence very well--I don't know when I'll get around to it. Perhaps soon, but perhaps not until it's out on dvd.) I especially like thinking about, and talking about, what makes movies (some of them, at least) work as art--the cinematography, the editing, the dialogue, the staging, and certainly not least the acting. Thus I was delighted to discover this informative little essay by Lee Siegel, in which he takes up the opportunity which the Oscar season provides us to reflect on the art of film acting, and runs with it. Siegel could no doubt say a lot more on this subject, but what he does say was insightful and provocative. He gives us a little bit of history:

"It's time to talk about acting because acting as an art with a history of evolving styles--acting as a highly developed discipline that demands specialized training--almost never gets discussed. When it does you'll find vague references to the Method, the naturalistic style of acting imported from Russia into this country by Lee Strasberg and the Actors Studio in the 1940s...But rarely is there mention of the fact that there were two antagonistic versions of the Method: Strasberg's emphasis on how actors should draw from their own experience to inhabit a character; and Stella Adler's insistence that actors must pay closer attention to the play's circumstances than to their own memories and emotions. Nor does anyone bother to observe that David Mamet has devised the only successful alternative to the Method...a style that consists of a high, though subtle, degree of deliberate artifice."

"Deliberate artifice"--that captures Mamet wonderfully. There's also this:

"[W]hat really revolutionized American acting wasn't the Method's naturalism. It was the emphasis Strasberg placed on facial expression....Strasberg believed that the essential instrument of an actor's creative expression was the face, and the result of his doctrine was to send generations of stage actors running to the camera from the stage, thus transforming the static, glamorous close-up of Bette Davis' day--in which the actor's face was motionless and timeless, existing for a moment outside the storyline--to the busy, emotive, and strategically timed close-up of today, in which the face and the camera work together to create thematic meaning and push the story forward. On stage, the hardest thing for an actor to do is to keep the emotion on his or her face after speaking the lines--the camera removes that hardship simply by moving off the face....To the extent that acting does seem more real today, it's because the camera moves so fast off the face that it shaves off any sliver of inauthenticity. When certain actors win the Oscar for best acting, they should thank the Lens and the Viewfinder, not Mom and Dad."

What a sharp observation--and perfectly true, when you think about it. Representing a story on a stage--or indeed, simply being a great story-teller--requires the ability to do more than speak lines and relate scenes; what is necessary is the ability to use those scenes, those words, to channel a whole mise-en-scene, a completely realized emotion, to the audience and hold it there, capturing the viewer in what's being said or done. Film can aid or undermine this kind of capacity in a variety of ways; I'd never thought about it in terms of how numerous takes are stitched together in order to create that captivating moment, but obviously a lot of what our contemporary film actors and actresses do is throw out one thing after another, until finally something sticks. A skill, surely....but is it the craft Siegel has in mind?

This line of thought leads to me wonder about those moments in certain movies when the director and performer put together a scene or two--usually simple ones, but not always--where real acting is on display: where the power or hilarity or wonder of the visual isn't due to the set-up (at least not very much), but really is a product of what the actor or actress is channeling. The result won't necessarily save a bad movie, but it usually infinitely improves what is around it--and for me at least, makes the performer's character utterly compelling. I can't take my eyes off him or her; if I'm watching a video or dvd, I replay scenes over and over; if it's something that comes on tv and I've seen it a hundred times I'll still watch it again, because the peculiar alchemy on the screen never fails to drag me in. For instance:

Kevin Spacey in L.A. Confidential
Holly Hunter in The Piano
Robert Duvall in Tender Mercies
Bill Murray in Rushmore
Michael Caine in Get Carter
Lauren Bacall in To Have and To Have Not
Toshiro Mifune in The Seven Samurai
Tony Curtis in Some Like It Hot
Robert Shaw in Jaws
George C. Scott in Dr. Strangelove
Orson Welles in A Touch of Evil
Jimmy Stewart in It's A Wonderful Life
Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca
Jean-Pierre Leaud in 400 Blows

I'm sure I could include many more if I thought about it. A lot of these are justly celebrated performances; others are either mostly forgotten or overshadowed by other moments in the performer's career. Indeed, not all of these films are especially great. But regardless, I could watch any of these movies over and over again, if only to be emotionally worked over by the scenes they include. Great acting, indeed.
Update: I went to bed after posting, and woke up having thought of a couple more to add. I realize that there are numerous classic performances that ought to be on this list just by virtue of critical acclaim: Siegel mentions Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront and Paul Newman in The Hustler. But maybe that's one of the mysteries of acting--even when you know it's happening, it doesn't necessarily happen to you. In the case of those two classics, for example, I don't find myself captivated, compelled to watch, as great as they admittedly are. But on the other hand...

Marlon Brando in The Godfather
Paul Newman in Nobody's Fool
Gong Li in Ju Dou
Richard Harris in Unforgiven
John Goodman in Barton Fink
Kathleen Turner in Peggy Sue Got Married
Robert De Niro in Brazil
Angela Bassett in What's Love Got to Do with It?

Anyway, no doubt I could go on and on...

2004-02-24T10:26:00.000-06:00

Immigrants, Language, and Assimilation

Samuel Huntington, of the "clash of civilizations" fame, has written an article which applies some of his civilizational concerns to the U.S.; specifically, he's worried about "The Hispanic Challenge" which the flood of Spanish-speaking Mexicans and Latin Americans presents to America's identity. David Brooks has attacked Huntington's argument in the NYT; David Adensik and Matthew Yglesias both concur. I'm not sure they necessarily dispute any of the details which Huntington presents as part of his argument; David admits that he doesn't know "the first thing about demographics or immigration." Huntington presents a wealth of data (here, here, and here) to support his claim that this particular wave of immigrants--both legal and illegal--is larger and different from all previous waves, and certainly no one can dispute that many of our present-day struggles over education, inner cities, entry-level wages and so forth are to a significant degree functions of our complicated relationship with Mexican immigrant labor. Still, Huntington will no doubt receive a great deal of criticism for the article, primarily for exactly the reason David, Matt and Brooks don't care for it: they're troubled by the claim that English-speaking Americans possess a particular cultural accomplishment, that said accomplishment is irreconcilable with the Hispanic culture which the new immigrants are bringing with them, and that ultimately "Mexican Americans will share in [the American] dream and in that society only if they dream in English."

Brooks puts the complaint with making this a "cultural" issue this way: "Frankly, something's a little off in Huntington's use of the term 'Anglo-Protestant' to describe American culture. There is no question that we have all been shaped by the legacies of Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin. But the mentality that binds us is not well described by the words 'Anglo' or 'Protestant.' We are bound together because we Americans share a common conception of the future. History is not cyclical for us. Progress does not come incrementally, but can be achieved in daring leaps. That mentality burbles out of Hispanic neighborhoods, as any visitor can see."

Nice, but unfortunately wrong, or at least significantly wrong. What Brooks is embracing here is a not uncommon version of civic nationalism, the idea that America (and maybe other countries too, but especially America, as we are "exceptional") is a modern construct, a nation of thought and feeling and commitment, a "future-oriented" and thus fundamentally open-ended experiment in identity--and consequently, the substance of American political and social life is infinitely pliable, not bounded by ethnic or religious or linguistic borders; all that matters is being a patriot (Brooks in particular mentions how Hispanics serve in the military--and die in military service--"at comparable rates" to the native-born) and accepting the intellectual content of our civic symbols: Lincoln for justice and equality, Jefferson for individual liberty, and so forth. This idea is really a transformation of culture--which should be properly understood in terms of what Hegel called Sittlichkeit, or in other words, an ethic embedded into a historical and situated life--into something purely ideological. It's the dream of many who wish to hold on to the idea of nationality and belonging, but don't want their belonging troubled by the idea that "belonging" may require more than a common desire to get ahead. This civic escape from the hard work of situating and belonging (of making all belonging into a Kantian Moralität, a principle rationally available to all humankind) has been thoroughly demolished by numerous thinkers (see David Miller, Charles Taylor, Bernard Yack, George Fletcher, Kai Nielsen, Neil MacCormick....just start here and here). To take specific issue with the matter of language...does Brooks actually believe that his "American" vision of the future--something that isn't "cyclical," but which leaps forward with "daring"--is perfectly translatable to any other tongue, any other cultural context, without any change in meaning? What kind of philosophy of language does he embrace? Surely, when this vision is spoken in a particular language, it entails a particular range of meanings, and for better or worse that range is altered (perhaps expanded, perhaps contracted, perhaps both along different dimensions) when it is put into a different linguistic field, with it's own range of historical antecedents and associations. I'm admittedly influenced by the work of Johann Gottfried Herder here, but that's just because his arguments make sense. Consider what this scholar wrote about Herder's (I think correct) grasp of language:

"[Herder's] doctrine denies that meanings or concepts are to be equated with the sorts of items, in principle autonomous of language, with which most of the philosophical tradition has equated them--for example, the objects to which they refer, Platonic "forms," or the "ideas" favored by the British empiricists [or the simple civic visions which Brooks assumes to be the sum total of the matter]--and equates them instead with usages of words [developed over history in a particular social context]....The argument is simple but compelling: Intuitively enough, thought is of its very nature conceptually articulated, articulated in terms of meanings. But now, if concepts or meanings just are usages of words, and grasping concepts or meanings hence is just being competent in usages of words, thought's essential dependency on and boundedness by linguistic competence...[is] both established and explained. Herder gives this argument in several places...[such as when he writes]: 'What exactly is the connection between language and mode of thought? Whoever surveys the whole scope of a language surveys a field of thoughts and whoever learns to express himself with exactness precisely thereby gathers for himself a treasure of determinate concepts. The first words that we mumble are the most important foundation stones of the understanding.'" (From "Herder's Philosophy of Language, Interpretation, and Translation: Three Fundamental Principles," The Review of Metaphysics 56 (December 2002), 341, 347.)

There is not necessarily any important political point here; only that, well, language matters--and hence, it is worth pondering the possible truth of Huntington's warning that "continuation of [Hispanic] immigration (without improved assimilation) could divide the United States into a country of two languages and two cultures...[and while such a transformation] would not necessarily be the end of the world, it would...be the end of the America we have known for more than three centuries." That's a real question, not one that can be ignored. Which is not to say that Huntington's framing of the question isn't weak--it is. Matt's basic objection to Huntington is correct (he writes that: "It's true that it often takes several generations before English fully displaces Spanish as the language of choice...[but] the same things were true of other large immigrant populations"); there's a xenophobic undercurrent to Huntington's specification of this wave of immigrants being a truly problematic wave as opposed to all previous ones. But still, neither are Huntington's basic premises incorrect. The English language spoken in the U.S. is by no means the sum total of American identity, but it is a vital part of it. America is a whole lot more than an "Anglo-Protestant" culture, but that doesn't mean that heritage can be completely dispensed in understanding how it is that our country perpetuates itself. Assimilation, in one sense or another, is a real issue, and a hard one, and easily disregarded by universalists of one stripe or another on both sides. When folks like Brooks say that being an American just boils down to having "a common conception of the future," he's dealing in platitudes that make it easier for xenophobes to justify themselves. And when folks like Huntington impose rigid civilizational lines on complicated questions like, for example, language assimilation, it makes it easier for liberals to think that "culture" needn't mean anything at all.

2004-02-23T17:24:00.000-06:00

My Nader Mea Culpa

Hmmm. Chun the Unavoidable has defended Nader's decision to run for president. This has inspired a great and reflective sigh from Timothy Burke, wondering why Nader-voters, and nothing else, ignites his youthful, inner flamer. Eric Alterman is, of course, simply appalled--but not necessarily worried, for (as Todd Gitlin and Ryan Lizza both show), it seems that Nader's efforts this time around may be more farce than anything else. Still, Chun's frustration with what he labels (unfairly, I think, but not entirely inaccurately) as the sanctimonious efforts of some liberals to trash the very idea of voting for Nader rings a chord with me. Given that some of the participants here (Burke, Chun, Invisible Adjunct) are talented, passionate bloggers that I definitely wouldn't want to have on my case, I'm not sure I should expose myself this way, but...

It needs to be said: I happily wrote in Nader for president in 1996, and happily voted for him for president in 2000. Why? Did I think he would be elected president? Nope. Did I believe he would make a good president if he was? Not at all. Did I vote for him because I was a Green? Not really; I'm more a Christian Socialist, one of those socially conservative leftist communitarians (I believe there are four or five of us) that thought (and still think, by the way) that Gephardt would have made a fine president, and would have been an even better one if he hadn't flipped his position on abortion rights back in the 1980s. Well, did I vote for Nader because I like the idea of third parties making their mark on the electorate? Partly; I do in fact think that the more than century old Democrat/Republican institutional dominance of electoral campaigns is a bad thing. That said, I had no illusions that, for example, if Nader had gotten the magic 5% and received federal matching funds that the Green party would have overthrown the two-party system anytime soon. So then, did I vote for him because I'm a believer in generating revolutionary crises? Er, no.

What does that leave? Tim's accusation that I "think of a vote rather like the little gold stars that elementary school teachers give prize pupils, as a badge of their virtue," I'm afraid. Except that I have a somewhat different understanding of (civic) virtue than Tim, I think. Do end states matter? Of course. Are they all that matter? Of course not. Political life, as everyone from Aristotle to Arendt has taught us, is not full (and thus not fully empowering or fully worth its costs) if it is not at least partly an expressive act, a putting of oneself into the agora, a contribution to the appearance of the public, as it were. (One of the reasons I greatly fear that, as Chun believes, Kerry will be annihilated is that there is little or no expressivity behind his impending nomination at all; his support is built primary out of metaparanoia about how "other" voters--the mysterious swing voters, perhaps--will react when Doomsday arrives.) Is any of that an argument for not voting strategically? Not at all. An idea or ideal can be expressed relative to or in conjunction with any number of different institutional or long-range intentions. In my case, I didn't believe for a moment Nader's overblown claim that there was no real difference between Clinton and Dole, or Bush and Gore. But I did worry about trade, and globalism, and systematic poverty, and the power of corporations over our civic life. Are those the most important issues in the world? Perhaps not. Were either Clinton or Dole or Bush or Gore talking about any of them in a serious or constructive way in either 1996 or 2000? No, not really. So was it worth putting forward my two cents as a citizen, and signaling a concern for issues that otherwise were going to be treated cavalierly, at best? I think so.

My caveat, which you can take for whatever you think it's worth: I lived in Virginia in 1996 and 2000, and Bush was going to (and did) take that state easily. Would my thinking have been different if I'd lived in Florida, or Oregon, or Wisconsin? Possibly. Knowing what I know now (or at least think that I know now), post-9/11, post-Iraq, about Bush and Gore, do I wish I had voted differently in 2000? No, if for no other reason than the above Virginia residency caveat. If I'd voted the way I had and had lived in Florida at the time, would I now be wishing that I hadn't voted the way that I did? Absolutely. (Counter-factual enough for you?)

Incidentally, Nader has no appeal to me this time around. Different world, different concerns, different ideas and ideals to be expressed, different needs to be met. Ralph Nader may have been, arguably, a historically important vehicle of expression in the America of the 1990s. Given that he isn't even bothering with the Greens anymore, I can't see how he could possibly be so today.

2004-02-19T10:23:00.000-06:00

Update to the Update (Talking Parenthood and (Relative) Poverty)

Laura is having a far more negative reaction to the Slate discussion of nannies and motherhood than I have had. Perhaps it's right that she does--after all, she's much closer to the environment which these writers (Caitlin Flanagan, Sarah Mosle, and Barbara Ehrenreich) inhabit than I am, and therefore is probably a lot more sensitive than I to the agendas lurking behind their words. Yesterday, I was pleased as punch to read Ehrenreich make what I thought was the crucial point about class in this whole discussion: that employing nannies simply enables upper-class mothers to abstain from the real struggle for decent childcare for all. But Laura has thrown a wet blanket on my thinking, and maybe she's right to do so:

"Good childcare for everyone would be nice. But I am not sure what it would look like. I've never seen it myself. My kids have been in okay situations that have not harmed them in any way, but they've only been there part time. Even if childcare was free for all, I don't think I would use it full time, but that's just me. I would like a little more childcare, more opportunities to work part time, a chance to return a full time career in a couple years, and more respect from feminists like Ehrenreich for my work at home."

Maybe Laura is misreading Ehrenreich; maybe she isn't. Ehrenreich, waving her old-fashioned (or is it?) feminist flag, does claim that:

"Our goal as 'old libbers'...was to share the childcare and housework among the adults in the household, boyfriends and husbands included. We lost on that one, or gave up the battle, or whatever...[W]hen women moved into the workforce, men never picked up on their share of the domestic work--and, speaking as a total fool for anyone under 3 feet tall, I would add domestic pleasures....[Don't] confuse feminism, which is a political movement, with the movement of (upper-middle-class) women into the workforce. There's a connection, of course: Feminist activism helped open up the professions to women, and many young female aspirants to the professions were feminists. But they're not the same thing. Feminism is not a particular lifestyle, defined by having your own job and checking account, for example. It is a moral stance and one that has always valued the stay-at-home mothers just as much as the corporate strivers. Hence, for example, the feminist resistance (coming from NOW and not just from lefties like me) to welfare reform in the mid-'90s. We felt poor women, like affluent women (and ideally men too), should have the option of staying home with their kids--that the work of caring and nurturing should be valued just as much as flipping burgers, sorting inventory, or cleaning offices at night."

See, I think this is strong, smart stuff. But it is also, of course, not a little revisionist and rigid. For NOW and other "old libbers" did, in fact, mock and deride the (often, but not always, socially conservative) women who chose to give up careers and activism for the sake of their children; Ehrenreich is correct to claim that feminism is a moral position, concerned with delivering autonomy to women in all positions in society, but it's a little rich to claim--especially when we look at the actual life choices of the sort of nanny-employing women who write books like Flanagan's!--that there hasn't ever been a presumption against child-rearing as a truly "liberated" form of empowerment. There is a sort of class bias present in their writing which Laura picks up on, a bias which discriminates, now that I think about it, against exactly the sort of off-the-clock, "slacker," give-up-on-ambition-and-submit-to-the-rhythms-of-ordinary-life parenting which Laura and I have praised. Laura has employed sitters, she's used daycare, she's seen elite nanny-centered families up close, and wants to be able to say that compromises in one's own life and family duties shouldn't be a badge of shame. And she's right: agonizing over how one should treat one's nanny, or how one can better argue for "universal" childcare, or how we can (as Mosle concludes) turn this all into a campaign to bring systematic reforms to the low-wage labor (i.e., nanny) market, hides some fundamental rationalizations; in Laura's words, a basic "unwillingness to take on even a part of the boring, messy business of watching kids." They avoid more simple questions, like (Laura again): "Is it worth it? Could one parent work less hours, make less money, and have less childcare?" And Laura's invective, even if I don't entirely agree with it, reminds me that such questions are, when it comes to dealing with you and your child (which is really what any debate over nannies or childcare should be about!), far more important than any others.

As I said before, we've never employed a nanny, because we've never needed to, wanted to, or been able to afford to even if the need or want was there. My wife has worked as a "sitter" (to use Laura's term), and she's seen the weird kind of envy, resentment, dependency, and judgments which follow from being, or being forced, to turn away for the length of a workday from one's own kids. So I've got no patience with those who rationalize and agonize from their upper and upper-middle class perches. But I still like what Ehrenreich has to say, because even if she's oblivious to how her position and attitude may compromise her message, at least she's sending it out. It's a message that gets at the heart of the issue of autonomy and equality, themes which I tend to think about philosophically, but which have a real practical edge to them as well. In a world of competition and material structures, there are ingrained patterns of inequality and dependency; some (the wealthy, the majority, the culturally dominant) have more autonomy than others. Figuring out how to redress that inequality is hard, much harder than simple redistribution of resources and opportunities (though that obviously helps!). I tend to read political contests and trends in light of these abiding, class-based, culturally manifest patterns, and I'm delighted when I see someone else discovering them in the context of otherwise unnoticed social phenomena (like in the maintenancece of public museums, or in this case, in the issue of childcare). I read Barbara Ehrenreich's book Nickel and Dimed as soon as it came out, and thought she'd expressed so much truth so well. But to be sure, there were limits to the "truth" she was able to put into those pages. A concern for the institutionalized socio-economic patterns which exploit many does not translate into a complete sympathy for those exploited, or a complete understanding of the ways in which people may be "empowered." For example, I remember that Ehrenreich, towards the end of that book, allowed that it wasn't the case that the working poor with whom she'd spent several months were simply inhuman, oppressed machines; they carved out lives for themselves in the midst of exploitation. She mentioned that she'd known a fellow housecleaner who'd written a science fiction novel in her spare time. I wanted follow up: did Ehrenreich ever read it? Was it any good? Was it fan-fic, or what? Did Ehrenreich just take this information and file it away, or did she ever consider maybe entering into her coworker's social or imaginary world, validating and enriching it through her contributions? I doubt it; in all likelihood, her coworker's economic condition is all that mattered.

Poverty and deprivation of all forms is bad; I know that. And I know the solution must involve something larger than just paying nannies better wages; and I'm a fan of anyone who helps reveal the structures and social obstacles behind the wage which should be our real targets. But targeting those structures, class-based though they may be, is not simply a matter of economics; it is a matter of how (and if) we can achieve humane autonomy and recognition. Dependency takes many forms besides financial; conversely, empowerment can happen many places besides at work. It can happen in one's imagination, it can happen at home, and it can (and should!) most definitely happen with one's kids. We shouldn't ever shy away from the hard issue of labor exploitation in the home--to say nothing of how we husbands contribute to such!--but Laura was right to indirectly remind me that, should we (as perhaps these women do) frame that exploitation in ways which internalize our own perspective ("oh what can we, the sort of women who already prefer the sort of arrangements which entail employing nannies, do to make our preferences just?"), then our solutions to it will be limited indeed.

2004-02-18T11:29:00.000-06:00

Update

I hope you're following the Slate discussion of Caitlin Flanagan's article about nannies and parenthood, which I mentioned below. Because if you aren't, you're missing the comments of Barbara Ehrenreich, and damn, is that woman right about so many things:

"In the golden days of the feminist second wave, our moral vision included high-quality childcare for all. What makes this 'nanny war' talk seem a little precious to me is that only about 20 percent of Americans are in any position to contemplate employing a nanny; the rest are scrambling for other, often group, forms of childcare....One thing that really bothers me about the nanny trend—in addition to the exploitation of so many nannies—is that it has removed the upper-middle class from the struggle for decent, universal childcare, just as the turn to private schools has removed them from the struggle to upgrade our public schools."

2004-02-17T17:11:00.000-06:00

Nannies and Autonomy

Laura over at Apt. 11D has spent a lot of time over the last couple of weeks asking questions, and seeking answers, about the household economy, about who does the laundry, about fathers and mothers and others raising kids today. Frequently, in the midst of all these posts, she's pointed us to an article by Caitlin Flanagan (not available online, unfortunately) in the latest Atlantic Monthly. The article in question, "How Serfdom Saved the Women's Movement," takes a hard, painful look and the divide between working mothers and stay-at-home mothers, and how it has come to seem necessary--indeed, almost expected--for the former group to make use of nannies and domestic help in order to enjoy the benefits of the women's movement. Not a new story, of course, but well told, just the same: in the modern world, too often the material autonomy of women--who are and, until genetic technology outstrips us all, will remain the members of our species who actually bear children--depends not upon some mighty transformation of the marriage relationship (as necessary as that might be), but rather upon low-wage workers to change the baby's diapers and generally care for it, in some cases practically full-time. For enlightened liberal women, this arrangement is a scandal, albeit one that no one is comfortable talking about.

There's a lot my wife could say about this--we've never had a nanny (couldn't afford it, and never desired one anyway), but she worked as one for a while; even took our two children along with her when she tended someone else's. For the time being, I will note two things. First, an interview with Flanagan is online here. Read it: Flanagan has many challenging and difficult things to say, about her own choices and those of others, about how her reliance on nannies made her part of an exploitive economy, about her envy of traditional (even fundamentalist Christian) mothers who give themselves over to creating loving environments for their children, and about her reluctant acknowledgement that, envy aside, she could never do that: as much as she loves her children, the idea of being a full-time mom scares her to death.

Second, I'll put on my philosopher's hat, and note that the uncomfortable dependency that modern autonomy has on the servitude of others is not only not a new discovery, but one covered in detail by one of the most discomforting thinkers of all time: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (who was pretty pathetic in the child-rearing department as well, for what it's worth). He writes: "What! Can liberty be maintained only with the support of servitude? Perhaps. The two extremes meet. Everything that is not in nature has its drawbacks, and civil society more so than all the rest. There are some unfortunate circumstances where one's liberty can be preserved only at the expense of someone else's, and where the citizen [substitute: mother] can be perfectly free only if the slave [substitute: nanny] is completely enslaved." (The Social Contract, Book 3, Chp. 15) Rousseau was talking about the way we delegate authority, the way we turn away from autonomy, because we refuse to countenance slavery. His point, however, was simply that being autonomous in a world of material dependency requires the constant exercise of that autonomy, and never letting it slide: if that means we need to find serfs to do the shit work, well...Rousseau isn't defending such an arrangement; he's just telling it like it is. Flanagan's moral sensitivity is greater than Rousseau's was, I'll warrant, but still: I'm sure she'd take the point.
Update: I've just discovered that Slate is running an online discussion between Sara Mosle, Barbara Ehrenreich and Caitlin Flanagan herself, discussing Flanagan's article, here. I'll be checking it out all week. According to Mosle, Flanagan is "an odd breed politically--a conservative on social issues and a liberal on economic ones, at a time when it's popular to be the opposite on both." Hurrah! That makes, oh, I don't know, about eight of us. Now I have to read more of Flanagan's stuff.

2004-02-17T10:28:00.000-06:00

AFOE Update

I've posted a couple of pieces over at AFOE: a long one on James C. Bennett's recent discussion of the rise of "network commonwealths," and a short comment, via Stanely Hauerwas, on the value of a socially "established" religious environment, particularly in connection to education. Check 'em out.

2004-02-16T09:12:00.000-06:00

Blogs and Blogging

A few quick introductions, and an announcement. Some folks I know have taken up blogging recently, and three more different blogs than these you're not likely ever to find linked together in one post. (That's one thing I'm especially grateful for in my life: a wide variety of intelligent, opinionated, and sympathetic friends.) First up, Matt Stannard's The Underview. Matt is a debate coach (and a very successful one) at the University of Wyoming; he is also an old and dear friend, a committed Marxist and radical thinker, who was at least as responsible (if not more so) than anyone else for my engagement in things political and philosophical. I always had those leanings, I suppose, but knowing Matt back at BYU in the early 1990s, watching him and learning from him as he protested the first Gulf War, articulated intelligent critiques of power structures all around us, and (as the years past) went through some very difficult times of his own, gave me inspiration, energy and direction. I've since veered off in a different direction than the one Matt and I were both on back in the day (and maybe he's veered a little too), but I'm as anxious as ever to hear what he has to say. I trust that sooner or later the rest of the strong left/socialist blogosphere will stumble across his writing, and stand up and take notice.

Rob Fergus is also an old friend from BYU (he and Matt and I actually all worked on an underground student newspaper together), and his politics are also much more radical than mine--and as with Matt, I like hearing what he has to say, because it keeps me on my toes, and helps me get to the heart of things. I don't know how much politics will appear on his blog, Urban Birdscapes, but I do hope a little sneaks in here and there. Rob is a dedicated environmentalist, and is very interested in turning critiques of our social and material economy into plans of action to help create more sustainable environments, for us and all our fellow creatures (particularly, if you couldn't guess, birds). One of these days I have to get down to Texas and go birdwatching with Rob. Until then, I'll just read his blog.

Coming from a very different point of view, Julie Sorrell is one of my graduate students here at ASU, and it's a delight to regularly read up on her thoughts at her blog, Julie's Cafe. Julie is a homemaker who has decided, now that her kids are (mostly) grown, to return to school and engage the world in a new and different way. Her mind has been set on fire by political ideas and international conflicts, particularly the war in Iraq. She's quite conservative, witty, fast thinking, at times sentimental but more often cynical (but in a good way), and willing to push her ideas as far as they will take her. (Not many women returning to school for the first time in over a decade would throw themselves into politics of the Middle East and Islamic culture.) Show your support, and stop by regularly.

Oh, and the announcement? I'll be guest blogging at A Fistful of Euros for the next week or so. I'll link whatever I write there on this page. If you're not reading AFOE, you should be.

2004-02-10T12:19:00.000-06:00

Slackerdom, Religion, Temporality, and the Kids

Laura is asking about raising kids and the role of fathers in the home; Harry Brighouse is asking about the ways in which one can raising "counter-culture" kids--and whether religious believers (specifically American evangelical Christians) have something to teach secular liberals in this regard. In many ways, I think they are looking at the same thing: namely, how can you prevent the "outside" (the economy, the office, social expectations, what's on tv) from dominating what you're trying to do with your family and your children on the "inside"? Harry, to his great credit, isn't being suckered in the usual liberal nostrums of making sure your kids watch PBS instead of something else: he's willing to take on television entirely. Laura, meanwhile, urges her girlfriends to avoid careerist types, and marry the slackers: "They might not make senior partner, but they'll make your dinner and play with the kids. You might not be able to afford a house in a town with a good school district, but so what? He's made lasagna for dinner." As someone who just praised "slackerdom," how could I disagree?

Keep up with Harry's and Laura's comments, as I'm sure there is going to be plenty of good ideas and good arguments tossed around. But I'd like to make a more theoretical point, which may connect a couple of, I think, very important concerns. Harry's inquiry into parenting shows a lot of sympathy of religious believers, and their well-documented ability to create a rival--and, Harry acknowledges, in many ways better, especially when it comes to raising children--culture all their own. What is it that I see "slacking"--in the sense of being turned off by the world's fairly obvious agenda of, as Harry put it, "manipulat[ing our] children into bugging [us] for more toys, more fast food, more candy, more, more, more"--and "believing"--in the sense of being attuned and committed to something literally not of this world--as having in common? Well, perhaps not very much, sociologically speaking. But one thing I have noticed, in regard to which believers very much are "slackers," if not vice versa, is their attachment--or perhaps detachment--from time.

By time I don't mean simply the limits they may place on their own or their children's use of time, but the sense of time, or temporality, itself. As a lot of insightful people--like Charles Taylor and Sheldon Wolin, among others--have observed, modernity is significantly a function of a single dominant tempo, or pace: all the world is on the clock, and we need to fill up all this empty temporal space (through acquiring, improving, progressing, etc.) before our time is up. Religious believers, especially those labeled (rightly or wrongly) as "fundamentalists," have a different attitude: they believe that "time" might actually end, that there's a judgment awaiting us, that we are always being held accountable in light of those ends, and not by anything temporal. (I should note that I would not be considered a "fundamentalist" by any but the most stringent secularist criteria, but that's not to say I don't have a fair amount of sympathy for them.) As a result, such believers are actually well equipped (theoretically speaking) to challenge the dominance of a timetable which is indistinguishable from the marketplace itself--always racing forward, always revising itself, always fallible, yet always improving, addicted to the newest, busiest, most "progressive" (read: technological) thing. Of course, environmentalists and Marxists and all sorts of others resist this kind of measurement--but do they actually have a sense of a different temporal order, a sense of where they came from and where they are going, that will empower them to step outside the material(istic) world, to "slack off," to say, as Christians like myself often say (and try fervently to believe), "take no thought for the morrow"? We all have our beliefs, our myths. But can they withstand peer pressure, commercial pressure, cultural marginalization? I'm grateful for my faith, because even though it isn't nearly strong enough, it helps me be content with what I've got, focus on my children, and get off the clock.

To put this in more philosophical terms, here's what I wrote on this subject some years ago, with some interjections (it's not available anywhere online, but you can buy the book that contains this essay here):

"On the one hand, the modern worldview has allowed its harmonized temporality and deliberate inclusion of difference to shape pluralistic and liberating public habits...; on the other hand, this slow but sure replacing of any belief in ends with [modern] fallibilistic presumptions has left us unmoved or uninvolved in substantive, collective rituals, leaving us all...open to an impersonal, automatic temporal acceleration against which we only have weak, individualistic myths to keep us secured....[Sheldon] Wolin suggests that in the midst of what is essentially a temporal dilemma [wherein we have little or no time which is our own, to think or act fundamentally or counter-culturally], something old must be invoked: not a new revolution, for revolution has already been appropriated into a commercial myth [borderless neoliberal capitalism's appropriation of the rhetoric of global empowerment, anyone?], but rather something collective and ritualistic and unexpected: something, perhaps, like belief." ("Can Theorists Make Time For Belief?" in Vocations of Political Theory, pg. 106).

2004-02-04T09:30:00.000-06:00

Generation X Walked...

Kevin Drum asked a seemingly simple question, and opened up a floodgate: why don't kids walk to school anymore? (He cites his own observations, as well as a study showing that less than 1/3 of kids between the ages of 5 and 15 who live within a mile of their school walk or bike.) The responses were numerous and revealing: fear of crime (real, sometimes, but mostly imagined), poorly designed neighborhoods without sidewalks, loss of cross-walk guards and other services, heavy backpacks, addiction to driving, overprotectiveness, insanely busy schedules, obesity and laziness, two-career families for whom the drive to school is the only real opportunity for parents to interact with their children one-on-one, and so forth. Any one of these is worth picking up on and thinking about at length. (Keiran Healy uses the question as an opportunity to revisit the empirical complications of the "tipping-point" phenomenon.) Lots of good thinking all around.

What I personally found most interesting was the flavor of many of the comments on Kevin Drum's site. Kevin's crowd is very much a liberal Democratic one, yet again and again, if you read them closely, you can see language straight out of the conservative playbook: "times have changed," "kids today don't know how to play," "things really were different back then," "it's a changed world," etc., etc. Some of the commentators try to tie this into their general anti-Republican political orientation (blaming it on SUV addiction, or Bush's culture of fear, or some such thing), but most just let their complaints stand alone mournfully.

I can sympathize, and I wonder at the sociodemographics at play here. Some people like to make a big deal out the (ambiguous) evidence that younger people are turning conservative; others mock--or are appalled by--the very idea. I can't speak for the youth of America, and I wouldn't want to put such a broad label as "conservative" on whatever ideological transitions are taking place out there anyway. But there was a time when I--born in 1968, grew up in the 70s and, yes, walked or biked to school almost every day--fiddled with writing an essay titled "When Generation X Sends its Kids to School." Not surprisingly, I started thinking about this when our oldest daughter, Megan (now 7), started kindergarten, and Melissa and I felt ourselves surrounded, overwhelmed, by advice and strategy and counsel about how best to educate our little girl, and how to keep her productive and safe, and which schools would offer what and how much, and what we should fear and how we could be ready to overcome or circumvent it. We felt baffled and distracted. A lot of it was our own doing, of course--first child going off to school and all that. There was a fair amount of class and regional anxiety involved too (lower-middle-class family, breadwinner just out of graduate school, leaving Washington D.C. for a one-year position in Mississippi, of all places). But above and beyond it all, there was something down deep that Melissa and I both felt: that the education of children in America--both in and out of school--has become in the public mind a very big, very important, very delicate, very nerve-wracking affair, when really, it probably shouldn't be. This is not to ignore the very real problem of failing schools or dangerous neighborhoods or anything else; we we're fully aware of that. But the high-pressure, time-sensitive, goal-oriented world of today's public schools felt very odd to us, and not a little bit wrong.

I realize that this is much too heavy-handed a generational stereotype, but maybe those in their 30s today remember a time when neighborhoods were (more or less) intact enough, and teachers were (more or less) trusted enough, and the streets were (more or less) safe enough, and families were (more or less) stable enough, to allow children--namely, us--larger amounts of time, space, and responsibility. Bike to school. Be home by dark. Catch the bus downtown. Climb a tree. And so forth. This sensibility doesn't drive any kind of "conservatism," necessarily, but it does, for many of us at least, solidify a real discontent we have with a social world that (for economic and cultural reasons) has been so mercilessly measured and surveyed and risk-assessed. Not long before our experience with Megan, I'd read David Brooks's extremely depressing (for me) article on "The Organization Kid"--the child of baby boomers who has been prepped and watched over and groomed to excel. Heavy backpacks and programmed time with the parents forms the basis of this type of person's interaction with the world. The parents of my generation, on the other hand--the older siblings, perhaps, of those who rebelled (my dad listened to Elvis in high school, not the Beatles)--somehow missed out on the need to change the world, and the micromanagement it (not doubt unintentionally) entails. And they raised us to be slackers. A bad thing? In some ways. But if I can somehow make sure my daughters have the power and opportunity to slack off--to find their own way, make their own mistakes, develop their own little world, perhaps all while taking the time to walk to school--in the midst of this high-pressure, paranoid world, I'll feel that I've done some good.

Incidentally, Megan has yet to walk to school; we've always lived too far away from her building. And thanks to strapped budgets and tax cuts and that old tipping point phenomenon, the minimal bus service the districts we've lived in have provided would have required her to be out of house down on the corner by 7:00am. So again, it's not like my, and other Gen X-type's, sensibilities necessarily require typical small-government-conservative positions. On the contrary, I want more and better bus service, upkeep of the sidewalks, and planned neighborhoods. In the face of change, to conserve something precious--like "slacking"--takes money and collective effort. So again, in so many ways, if this is "conservatism," it's a new kind under the sun.

2004-02-02T00:02:00.000-06:00

It's All Coming Together (Slowly)

In the past week, I've written a couple of long posts on poverty and intervention, as well as a couple of shorter posts addressing my feelings about President Bush. The common thread running through all of them, more or less, is the political salience of, and moral nature of, compassion--and consequently, the degree to which it does, or does not, validate or justify or explain policies of distribution, intervention, and even coercion. I give money to the beggar, Nicholas Kristoff buys the freedom of prostitutes, Bush spends money left and right and invades a country in (mostly) the name of liberty. Apples and oranges, or all of a piece? Is there any coherence to all my various feelings about all these disparate events and actors? And now George F. Will writes a column wherein he claims that both conservatives and liberals need to wake up to what President Bush is trying to accomplish: the articulation of "strong government conservatism," a ruling philosophy which, rather than attempting to undermine or limit the contemporary interventionist state, tries to turn its positive actions in the direction of individual ownership, empowerment, morality and education, rather than collective welfare neutrally distributed. Despite the many ways in which Will's claims can be qualified--particularly via demonstrating the degree to which Bush's "compassion" has been more about unpredictable political opportunism than principled action--I knew as soon as I read it that Will had touched upon something that might help me weave my meandering thread into an actual coherent tapestry. But I couldn't quite put it into words. Then, with gratitude, I noticed that someone else already had:

"This is an extremely perceptive column on the part of Mr. Will, one of the first by a mainstream conservative to truly grasp the import of the President's vision of an "Ownership Society." The hard thing for Republicans to reckon with is the fact that modern man turns out not to be conservative in the classic sense--does not choose to live life without a social safety net in a kind of social Darwinist free for all. The hard thing for liberals to accept is that neither does this desire for security in an emergency make men any more amenable to being constantly dictated to by government when they aren't in particular need of help. The future lies then in a synthesis of the desire for freedom and the requirement of security (what Mr. Will calls equality). Bill Clinton understood this on a very superficial level and Tony Blair seems to recognize it more deeply. But it is the GOP that has the best chance of creating a thoroughgoing Third Way, and not incidentally making itself a semi-permanent majority party. The key is that conservatives have to accept the seemingly perverse notion that government itself, even a sizable government, can be the instrument by which conservative values are cultivated in society."

Bush, Clinton and Blair: all in the same sentence, and moreover, all presumably trying to articulate and work out the same essential idea? That's a pretty controversial reading of recent political history, to say the least. But I've always kind of liked "Third Way" talk, and Orrin Judd's comments here help me go a long ways towards situating myself and my conflicted beliefs and convictions into that talk. I'm doubtful of his conclusion that the GOP is the most likely spot for seeing this sort of "(economically) strong (activist) government (social) conservatism" to emerge; from what I can tell, the last prominent Republican to really try it, and actually want to put the money up to pay for it, found no help on either side of the aisle. But I'll keep an open mind. I'm still trying to figure out what this entails for my political allegiances; I think I may be moving towards a full-fledged position here (note to my many friends who have long since given up hoping I'll ever fully commit to any political position: don't laugh; I mean it), but (of course) I'm not there yet. In the meantime, the one substantive criticism I have of Orrin's gloss on all this is that, while he very admirably ties the idea of strong, individually-directed government action to "reknitting families, neighborhoods, communities, and so on so that civil society resumes its central place in our lives," ultimately the intellectual underpinnings of his reading of Bush and our (I hope, at least) Third Way future is one that is dismissive of the group; in its defensible effort to focus on the individual, it drops the necessarily social, even collective, aspect of welfare, justice, virtue, and even (yes) liberty. There is a lot I still have to think about here. But my fear is that as long as the compassion of Bush and others like him, however sincerely and well implemented through government (and I acknowledge the criticisms of those who claim it is neither), is ignorant on this point, then whatever other good is accomplished, the egalitarian concern which, I think, makes the whole movement worthwhile, will be at best secondary, if not a sham.

2004-01-29T21:44:00.000-06:00

Update

A friend of mine read the post below, and watched the ad I liked, and had a completely contrary reaction. I'm posting my friend's comments here (anonymously, with permission) because I think they encapsulate quite well a certain pro-Bush position that is central to any fair assessment of the man's strengths (and weaknesses). (Note: you have to have watched the ad to make sense of what follows.)

"The unintended flip side of the ad expresses the feelings of many other people. Bush will paint the apartment. His roommates will complain, carp, debate, get high, talk about all the other things that need to be done around the house, ultimately doing nothing. Bush sees a need for a paint job, he arranges for it to be done.

"You can complain about the details of what Bush has done over the past several years. But you can't reasonably complain (though some always will) that he hasn't done anything. The guy doesn't claim to have all the answers. He's flexible and adaptive. He compromises often. And he gets things done. Educational standards? Done. Campaign finance? Done. Prescription drug benefits? Done. The Taliban? Done. Tax reductions? Done. (And to anyone who would vote for a Democratic candidate, I would urge them to go to one of the many online 'Bush Tax Cut Calculators,' find out how much they've saved in taxes over the past several years, and donate that amount to their Democratic candidate of choice, just in the interest of ideological consistency.) Whatever he sets out to do, he does. (4/5's of the Iraqi deck of cards. 2/3's of known al Qaeda leaders.) Take your recent sex slavery blog entry. Bush spoke out about the need to do something to stop that brand of exploitation. (Were any other major political figures in the US speaking out about it? Was this a problem that didn't exist during the Clinton years?) And, according to the article's laundry list of recent legislation pushed through by the administration, he followed through. Bush makes things happen. Whether you like the color green or not, a fresh coat of paint is better than pock-marked, dingy, pizza-smeared walls.

"I'm frightened by Bush's success. But, in a lot of ways, it's nice to see a leader, rather than a poll-reader and hand-wringer, in the White House. And when people feel unsafe (as many still do, after 9/11), that's the kind of President they want."

My response is basically: I don't think I made the complaint that Bush isn't doing anything, and if I did I would recant it. He's certainly a busy man. And as I tried to express in my first post, there's a fair amount of that busyness that I can't help but find admirable. He is, in fact, getting a lot of things done, or at least pushing others towards getting things a lot of things done (immigration reform, educational standards, faith-based initiatives, etc.) that I approve of, his response to the Taliban most triumphantly. But that's not sufficient. Maybe he is flexible and adaptable; but maybe that's another way of saying careless and inconsistent. All too often there is an irresponsibility, insularity, and ignorance in how he crafts, articulates, and pursues--and frequently dismisses, if they don't seem be meeting with instant public acclaim--his policies. (See Hendrik Hertzberg's devastating take-down of Bush's SOTU speech for more on this.) And I'm speaking here of those intentions of Bush's which I agree with. It goes without saying that there are also a lot of elements of Bush's political platform which I dislike--and as the occupation of Iraq has gone on, more and more of these have emerged.

Granted, it's more fun to say that Bush is evil incarnate than to allow that he's a decent man with some good ideas and some bad ones, capable in some ways and completely over his head in some (ever-more important) others. But the latter, more nuanced view is the more accurate one--and in fact, I suspect that the more the former view predominates, the easier it will be for Bush & Co. to continue to stigmatize their enemies, and go on without any engagement with the real world.

2004-01-29T12:22:00.000-06:00

Should I Like Bush?

Lately I've been wondering if, against my better judgment, President Bush isn't in fact somewhat close to the sort of person I'd like to be president--or, more accurately, if his policies aren't in fact pretty much the sort of policies I'd like a president to endorse. I mean, think about it--I'm an upper-left-hand quadrant communitarian, a social conservative and a social democrat, a believer in morals and equality. So what does that mean, practically speaking? Well, it means I believe in...a lot of things Bush believes in, or at least says he believes in. Faith-based initiatives? Check. Promoting democracy abroad? Check. Support for the institution of marriage? Check. Funding for the arts and education? Check. And so on. I'm open-minded about his immigration proposal. Like George Packer (scroll down), another chastened liberal hawk, as much as I am embarrassed and dismayed at how the Iraq war and occupation was executed, "I can't wish the fall of Saddam's regime undone." And so, yeah, the man's got problems, real problems...but shouldn't I, of all people, be basically sympathetic to the guy? I mean, the libertarians of the blogosphere are always describing this particular mix of positions as "authoritarian"--and now we have a president who, as Andrew Sullivan recently put it, wants to be our "Nanny in Chief," combining "Big Government liberalism with religious-right moralism." Shouldn't that be what I'm all about?

Well, anyway, here is David Bernstein's libertarian take on why an economic and/or foreign policy and/or civic liberal like myself ought to actually like Bush. (He posted a follow-up here.) Matthew Ygelsias was foolish enough to think that David had a point; his readers have subsequently let him have it for deviating if only hypothetically and temporarily from the Bush-hating faith. As for me--well, I could challenge the democratic or communitarian substance of most of Bush's policies pretty easily. The way he proposes to pay for all the (in some ways) good things he's doing is all wrong (even assuming he does intend on paying for them, which is doubtful); the way he articulates his (in some ways) reasonable social and domestic policies is short-sighted and divisive; the way he's enacting his (in some ways) admirable foreign policy goals lacks humility, cultural awareness, historical sensibility or basic competence and seriousness. And besides, even allowing for all that, the man is a complete failure when it comes to labor (temporary and politically-driven trade tariffs notwithstanding), and not much better when it comes to the environment (yes, a lot of accusations made against him are overwrought, but still: it's clear that in Bush's heaven, Jesus drives an SUV.) In the end, the "If The Bush Administration Was Your Roommate" ad, out of all the entries at "Bush in 30 Seconds", expresses my current feelings about the man best. Maybe his policy sensibilities aren't all wrong, maybe his political instincts are pretty good, maybe his heart is mostly in the right place. But that doesn't stop him from being foolish, careless, and (as I wrote a while ago) exploitive of people and citizens who expected more from him, and in any case deserve better.
Note: When I write "support for the institution of marriage" above, I'm talking about Bush's embrace of pro-marriage policies in connection with fighting poverty and teenage pregnancies, not his position on "traditional marriage" vis-a-vis other versions of the institution. My opinion on same-sex marriage is, to be frank, in flux: I change my mind a lot about it. (Those interested in some long, religious, specifically (though admittedly peculiar) Mormon reflections on the topic can check out what I think here.)

2004-01-28T10:12:00.000-06:00

Nicholas D. Kristoff, George W. Bush, and the Intervening American

A confluence of depressing stories of late: Peter Landesman's horrifying tale of the traffic in sex slaves in the U.S., and Nicholas Kristoff's heart-wrenching, ambivalent dispatches from Cambodia, telling the tale of his attempt to free a couple of Cambodian girls from a prostitution ring (parts 1, 2, 3, and 4; only the final two are still free). One doesn't have to say too much about the horror in these stories. The blight of prostitution, especially in the third world, is a terrible one, and as for sex-trafficking...well, even if, as seems likely, not all the details in Landesman's story pan out (and everyone with a heart should hope it isn't all true), I can still only agree with Timothy Burke: everyone involved in this trade, the enablers, the pimps, the cargo-carriers, and especially the johns, is evil.

But Timothy's condemnation puts me in mind of another set of reflections from his pen (or keyboard, as it were); an essay on intervention that I cited long ago, back when my feelings about international intervention, and the Iraq war, were a lot more settled. It also puts me in mind of The Quiet American, Graham Greene's intense meditation on sin, ignorance, and good intentions, all in the context of America's growing involvement in--and, crucially, America's eclipse of European influence over--Vietnam. Timothy, reflecting on how "a weak and evasive leader, George Bush, can pursue an utterly destructive method of intervention and [nonetheless] command the loyalty of many people of good will [solely] because the alternative seems to be the hypocritical defense of a corrupt network of hollow national leaderships, and the betrayal of human emancipation," came to a heavy conclusion: "We [meaning, I think, us liberals] are all interventionists now...The question of the 21st Century is not whether interventions should happen, but how they should happen. It is a question of method and result, not of yes or no." I said at the time that he was right, and I still think that, as much as the past year has shaken my liberal (inter)nationalist dreams. Intervention is an unavoidable reality at the present moment. What I have also been thinking lately, and that which I connect with Kristoff's small-scale experiments with "liberation," is that the real imperative of intervention isn't just a function of this moment, but a moral imperative of much deeper and murkier roots.

Consider Kristoff: the intervening American. He comes to Cambodia, checks out sweatshops, observes the girls selling sex. He travels with an interpreter, with a producer and a cameraman and a driver. He has loads of cash and contacts. He gets it into his head to buy the freedom of a couple of these girls enslaved in local brothels. He has to pick those he's going to free (a morally complicated story all on it's own). He has to haggle with the brothel owners. He has to deal with--and if you read between the lines, understand that this really means "override"--their doubts and fears. He takes them away from one social network (and exploitive one, to be sure, but also one that envelopes and perversely sustains them) and returns them to another one: their families, which in one case rejoiced in their return, and in another case couldn't care less (they'd gotten her into prostitution to pay debts in the first place). The conceptual realities which Kristoff has used his money and power to leap over in pulling this off--differences language, social mores, gender roles, moral schemes and so much more--are the sort of thing that could keep multiculturally sensitive academics busy for years. And, in the end, one of the girls returns to the brothel, while the jury is out on the second.

Was he right to do so? Was it worth it? The answer is, of course, yes: prostitution is hideous, and the poverty that drives one to it is a sin. Of course he should intervene, no matter how clumsy his interventions may or may not turn out, in the long run, to have been. Perhaps the long-run shouldn't be our criteria for judging interventions: maybe the immediate need is all we can properly label, and respond to.

You can see where I'm going with this with Bush, of course. Leaving aside the possibility that the Iraq war really was just a Haliburton conspiracy from beginning to end, what are you left with? An ignorant but good-intentioned American, with a big army and lots of money and all the popular support in the world. And over there is Iraq, and it might be a threat, and in any case the Iraqi people are suffering horribly. Clearly we can do something. So...why don't we? Alden Pyle came to Vietnam, and he figured communism was bad news, and moreover, he didn't like how the British journalist Robert Fowler just strung along his Vietnamese mistress, never offering her the chance of the decent marriage. So he got involved. In Greene's view, the result was catastrophe, because the stupid "quiet" American couldn't imagine how complicated the world really was (easy analogy to the Bush administration here: "The Iraqis will welcome us with open arms"); and more importantly, he couldn't conceive at just how bloody his hands already were, and how much more bloody they were likely to become. However, unlike in the film (as I wrote in a thread at John Holbo's blog), Greene recognized in the book that sin covered Fowler as well; that his "wise detatched European" was every bit as compromised by his actions in Vietnam has Pyle's were. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. In which case, if damnation will follow regardless, why not act? At least someone might not have perform sex acts for money for a little while. At least a tyrant will be overthrown. At least someone's life might be at little bit better, right?

No easy answers, especially not for us middle and upper-class liberal Americans, who have the power to intervene--to buy the freedom of sex slaves, to bomb a tyrant's palace, give help the poor and desperate in the way many others cannot. To be sure, the imperative of "evil" does not end the conversation: there are, after all, consequences to consider. And clearly, the calculation of consequences in Kristoff's case was far less troublesome than it was in the case of Pyle's, or Bush's--Kristoff's acts may well result in a lot of confusion and false expectations on the parts of those whose freedom he swept in and bought (and those he didn't), but at least by no stretch of the imagination was anyone going to die. Whereas Bush's intervention was all about violence. So no: they are different sorts of Americans, performing different sorts of interventions. And yet still, I can't help but wonder if the call to intervene, the weight which the fact of poverty and horror and hurt places upon us, and the reaction it elicits from us, isn't fundamentally the same in all cases, and I wonder if getting hung up on those "consequences" isn't a way of brushing aside evil (well, sex-trafficking is a really complicated subject...), walking past hurt (hey, for all I know, those prostitutes like the life they're leading...), keeping our wallets shut when we hear the call of the beggar (you know he's just going to spend it on alcohol anyway...), and wasting time talking about concepts like "sovereignty" as if they were eternal realities, when they are in truth anything but. Obviously, I'm trying to load issues of war and freedom, sexuality and dignity, on to my earlier post. Unreasonable? Or are they, ultimately, the same issue after all?

2004-01-27T10:33:00.000-06:00

Europe-Islam-Identity Round-Up

In some ways it's odd that I've written so much lately about European identity, Islam in Europe, and the EU; I'm not a Europeanist nor a scholar of Islam by any stretch of the imagination (what little actual knowledge I have in the area of comparative politics is grounded in East Asia). But still, Europe's present (and likely to continue for the foreseeable future) crisis fascinates and worries me, and fires up all my philosophical pistons. Europe (like Canada, and Israel, and Iraq, and really any society dealing with the mixed issues of history, identity, political modernity, nationality and constitutionalism) is at the forefront of the essential, worldwide debate which 9/11 helped throw wide open: what kind of sovereignty--the ability to rule oneself, to achieve democratic legitimacy, to have a foreign policy--can exist in a postnational age? (The corollary questions to that big one being: do we have, and do we need, a new definition of sovereignty? and are we in fact "postnational," or is that even possible?) So I just can't get away from it, and I follow up on every argument pertaining to it (from Habermas's and other's heavy theory, to the latest secularist nonsense coming out of France) as best I can.

Which doesn't mean I have the time to get it all down on this blog. So let me review some recent matter that I've haven't commented on (at least, not here) the way I would have liked, but which anybody who is into these debates ought to be familiar with.

There's always good stuff to be found over at A Fistful of Euros, and one recent thread in particular made for good reading. Responding to an essay on immigration and belonging by Amitai Etzioni, a leading communitarian writer and thinker, Edward Hugh invoked French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas to claim that "one of the measures of our degree of civilisation as a community is our open-ness to the other"--or, in other words, as I understand his point, that any sense that immigrants and others ought to conform to some static, cultural "us-identity" is to wrongly privilege a false communal unity over the actual fluid diversity of "otherness." Interestingly, he titled the post "Diversity within Unity," and I'm not sure if he was aware that that's the title of one of Etzioni's more influential political platforms, or if he was and meant to criticize it. In any case, his comments gave rise to a vigorous debate over the changing character--social, ethnic, and otherwise--of Europe and various European nation-states as a consequence of Muslim immigration, and Scott Martens and I tangled some over what kind of diversity is and is not possible within a legitimate community. Read and enjoy.

Speaking of Scott, he's active again at his own blog Pedantry, thankfully, and producing great stuff. He recently put together a very long, insightful and thoughtful post on versions of secularism, the ways in which religious identity might be expressed in the social context of such, and particularly what Islamic law and thought might be able to contribute to the growth and adaptation of the European secular tradition of justice of law. He's done a tremendous amount of reading and thinking, the results of which enlightened me about a great deal.

On the opposite end of things, George Weigel's mournful diatribe in the latest First Things against Western Europe's "atheistic humanism," and how it has led to Europe's moral, demographic, and political decline, is anything but informative. Granted, it's a wonderfully written piece, and plays to the conservative view of "Old Europe" expertly. But as a work of political theology, it was weak: to simply say that Europe has turned atheistic is neither entirely accurate, nor new, nor particularly insightful. He does do a good job deepening and expanding on Robert Kagan's rather simplistic America-Europe, Mars-Venus, Hobbes-Kant thesis, and there were a few points where I thought Weigel was touching on the real heart of the matter: that politics takes place within horizons, and that by lacking (spiritual) horizons Western Europe has thus to a significant degree weakened its belief in the possibility of political construction, improvement, progress; bureaucracy and top-down justice (via the European Court of Justice, for example) thus becomes a refuge from a deeply human, democratic enterprise that has perversely come to seem barbaric to a great many European minds. But Weigel doesn't, at least in my view, make nearly enough of that hermeneutic; in the end, he just baldly claims that they're all a bunch of secularists over there, and hence lack faith in the future, and hence have become secretly (or openly) bitter of those states whose faith in God enables them to continue to still insist upon their cultural viability. He makes an interesting connection to WWI, and how it became an orgy of "self-mutilation," but to say that WWI was made possible by an "atheistic hubris" is insufficient. WWI was the result of decisions made by robust, culturally assertive, spiritually confident states (maybe not Russia, but definitely France, Great Britain and Germany). There was a great deal of piety on both sides, with churches lining up to bless the troops. If Weigel wants to trace Western Europe's struggles to a civilizational crisis which began in the trenches in France, then he needs to explain how atheistic humanism somehow got into the bloodstream of societies which tolerated a war conducted via trenches. (He does, rather reluctantly, suggest that part of the answer might be found in thinking about what the Catholic Church--and presumably other churches--were doing in response to the rise of democracy in the 18th and 19th centuries, but he goes no further, which is too bad: if he did, then he might have to acknowledge that the "secularism" he decries (as Charles Taylor, whom he uses crudely, could have told him) was more than just a "turning away" from the spirit, but was in part an outgrowth of the purposive direction of the spirit of Christianity in Europe itself.)

Finally, check out this opinion piece from last Sunday's Washington Post. There are uncomfortable questions that need to be asked about Europe demographic transformation and immigrant Muslim populations, and too few people are asking them. This essay is a good start.

2004-01-26T16:51:00.000-06:00

The Poor Oppress Me

A week and a half ago, Jennifer (I don't recall her last name) came to our door. It was raining out and Jennifer, who was wearing jeans and an old knit sweater, was soaked and shivering from the cold. I'd never met her before. She was short and fat, had tattoos on her forearms; her hands were calloused and her face had heavy lines--she looked to be in her late 40s, but poverty (and abuse) can age you prematurely. She was desperate for $13 so she could afford a bus ticket to Oklahoma to visit her ailing mother, and had--in a wet garment bag--a wedding dress she was willing to sell. She told me that she'd already walked downtown (they had no car), and tried to sell it at a couple of second-hand stores, but no one would buy it. She stood dripping on our doorstep pleading with me, fumbling with the zipper of the bag, explaining to me the quality of the dress, and her lack of any other funds (lots of debt, no job, husband on disability), while our oldest daughter stared at this stranger from behind me. I told her to put the bag aside; I'd give her a ride to an ATM (we had no cash in the house) and get her enough to buy her ticket. We chatted on the way; she learned I was Mormon, I learned what had happened to her husband (back injury). After I gave her $15, I took her back to her apartment, which has about a half-mile from our home.

She could, of course, have been making up the whole thing. Maybe she needed to pay rent. Maybe she wanted to rent some movies. Maybe she wanted to buy drugs. Maybe she'd lost a bet. Maybe she was too embarrassed to say the money was for food. Moreover, maybe she'd already gone around our whole block with the same story. It really doesn't matter to me; I've long since decided that I have neither the wisdom nor the heart to subject the decisions and actions--the strategies and humiliations--of those poorer than I to critical analysis. On the contrary, whenever I'm approached by those in need (and I've been approached a lot), I feel drawn out, weighted down, and pulled towards a response: any response, the more immediate the better. A dollar for the homeless man here, fifteen dollars for the woman on the doorstop there, putting someone up in a hotel room over there. The poor oppress me, or perhaps it's the fact of poverty which does: it burdens me, robs me of judgment and independence, obliges and makes demands of me, turns me into a beggar like them (though of course, to compare the oppression of one's conscience to that of actual financial hardship is insulting in the extreme).

I'm not the only one for whom poverty is an intellectual or spiritual tripwire. Just a day or two after I met Jennifer, I read David K. Shipler's presentation of the story of Caroline Payne in The New York Times Magazine. It is a depressing story, a pathetic and desperate one. Caroline is one face of the working poor in America, a woman who has made a few bad choices in her life and had more than a few bad days, and has found--as many millions have found--that the free market is remarkably unforgiving of either. The result is that, after decades of hard, continuous work at bottom-level jobs--at a Wal-Mart, a clothing factory, homeless shelter, a thrift store, a tampon factory, a bank, and so forth--Caroline can barely put food on the table for herself and her mentally handicapped daughter, Amber. It's not an easy story to read; Caroline lacks a stable home, a supportive family, helpful friends, a secure future, and all of her teeth. Hers is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a happy or fulfilled life. Shipler's article sparked numerous, angry threads in the blogosphere, as conservatives and liberals and socialists and libertarians had at each other with great viciousness, trying to prove that the capitalism was exploitive, that the welfare state corrupts, that the rich are greedy, and that the poor deserve it. Nothing cuts those of us in the middle and upper classes to the quick more quickly than the fact of poverty, and its ugly intractableness. Shipler knows this, which is why he spreads the blame:

"Poverty is a peculiar, insidious thing, not just one problem but a constellation of problems: not just inadequate wages but also inadequate education, not just dead-end jobs but also limited abilities, not just insufficient savings but also unwise spending, not just the lack of health insurance but also the lack of healthy households. The villains are not just exploitative employers but also incapable employees, not just overworked teachers but also defeated and unruly pupils, not just bureaucrats who cheat the poor but also the poor who cheat themselves."

For some, such blanket assessments (the causes of poverty are nearly endless, and all proposed solutions likely fruitless) are justification to wash one's hands of the whole endeavor. Work hard, treat your employees well, hope for the best, encourage economic growth and make some provision for the needy, sure--but that's the extent of it. For others, such a broad assessment of the problem of poverty is a cop-out, a dodge of that one true revolutionary progressive solution that just hasn't been tried yet. (Laura says it brings out her "inner commie.") I wish I could say that I confront poverty with such clarity, whether in terms of ideology or practicality or something in between. But no: hardships like Caroline's make a fool of me. They make me weak, and remind me of an encounter I had while when I was serving a mission for my church, years ago, in South Korea.

I was working with a Korean church member, and had been in the country about five months. We'd visited a contact in a small town on the outskirts of our area, and were waiting for a bus to take us home. It was just your average street in a small, rural Korean town: muddy roads, half-finished construction projects, groups of men talking, working, waiting or drinking. About ten feet away from the bus stop, someone had dumped a pile of garbage in the gutter, just a minute or two before. Suddenly, a woman appeared from out of an alleyway behind me: hair cropped short, face scarred and burned, thin, wearing nothing but a t-shirt, sweats and sandals (though it was winter). She dove into the pile of garbage, and began to eat, desperately. She grabbed rotten and cast-off vegetables and bit into them; she scooped up something soft (rice mush? ice cream?) and gobbled it, smearing it all over her face. I watched her, revolted and amazed. She turned, and caught my eye. A man who had been waiting for a bus along with us walked over to the woman, yelled at her, and proceeded to kick her in the ribs and stomach and face. She rolled over, bleeding, but kept on grabbing at food in the pile. Then our bus pulled up, my companion said, "Let's go," and I got on the bus and lost sight of her. And I thought right then, and have thought ever since: I've just committed a terrible sin. She looked at me, and I did nothing. Much of what I'd been taught about "big sins" and "little sins" seemed to wash away in that instant, and I thought: what greater failure could there possibly be than what I have just done?

I acknowledge that my ignorance was total: I had no idea where that woman was from or what her real needs were or whether that man kicking her was her father or husband or whether she was a criminal or a mental patient or anything else. Moreover, I also know full well that, practically speaking, there was nothing I could have done. I was a twenty-year-old kid who with little knowledge of the local language or culture. I had very little money on me, and besides, someone driven crazy by hunger and heaven knows what else needs more than money. The idea of me trying to drag her onto the bus along with us would have been ludicrous, and where would I have taken her? To our apartment? To the mission office? To a hospital? I was a proselytizing missionary: I wasn't trained to provide welfare to those in need, and didn't have the resources available to do so anyway. There are passages in the Mormon scriptures which remind us that we are all beggars, and caution us against judging those who petition us for aid (these, for example); but those same passages--as if their author had fear of a too-radical application--also make allowances for those without the resources to help, and suggest that such things were to be done with "wisdom and order" in any case (see here). I agree. And yet...I could have helped. I could have given her everything in my wallet, and walked home. I could have stayed with her, stood in the way of her attacker, wandered around to shops begging for food for her, selling my possessions (my briefcase? my suit? my camera?) if need be. It would have broken mission rules. It might have gotten me beat up. It probably would have ended in farce and an embarrassment to the local church, with both of us starving and abused on that street corner. But I could have done it, and at least she wouldn't have been alone. It probably wouldn't have been wise or orderly, but at least I would have responded--and that, whatever the effectual end of my response, I thought then and continue to think now, would have been better than doing nothing.

Certain thinkers, drawing upon Rousseau, would likely suggest that the feeling I had for that woman--and for Jennifer, and all the other desperate folk before whom I have felt singled out and called upon--isn't charity or love, but rather a corrupted kind of compassion or pity. Corrupted because such "compassion," according to this view, isn't outwardly directed at all; rather, it's a twisted self-love, a sense of obligation which rests not so much on fellow-feeling as on self-remorse: their pain causes me pain, reminds me that "there but for the grace of God go I," and otherwise engenders sympathy. Real charity responds to the whole person, in light of an eternal (or natural, or traditional: pick your moral philosophy) scale of virtue that helps us judge what is needed and what is not. Pity, on the other hand, responds instinctually to the hurts of others, as we respond instinctually to remove the causes of our own discomfort. Such an interpretation might link my responses to deprivation and desperation to the failures of modern politics and the welfare state: giving aid without critically assessing those requesting it is a recipe for dependency, they might say; it's a (self-)proclamation of sincerity and feeling, rather than actual (and therefore demanding) love.

I don't disagree with that criticism, at least not entirely. There is a real weakness, in the classical sense, in my genuflection before those who beg. But moral concepts change and evolve, and not all evolutions are negative. If one believes (as I do) that ideas are not abstract, but rather are embedded in a world of material and history, then one might also consider the possibility that the meaning of ideas might change as the times change, and yet still be as truthful as before. One scholar once called Rousseau "the prophet of history who despaired of history," and he was right: Rousseau saw better than any other thinker of his day that the modern world, the world of markets and contracts and the masses, was separated by an enormous gulf from thomogeneous, hierarchical, homogenous, trusting world of the past; as much as we might want that world to return, it is lost, and hence must be recreated rather than recovered. Rousseau's project was a large and in many ways dubious and dangerous one, but in regards to modern forms of attachments perhaps he had moral cause (even if he perhaps didn't acknowledge such) to make the claims he did. Perhaps it is, in fact, an advance to be weak in the face of hunger, sorrow, suffering, and the furtiveness and desperation of those who want. No doubt the social and economic breaking down of old orders (of class, lineage, race, gender, and so forth) has resulted in a great deal of dysfunction and pain in our civilization; but maybe that breaking down has also allowed the call of weakness, of submission, of being a humble and responsive servant to all--in other words, the call of Christ, at least as I understand it--to be heard better than ever before. Perhaps with the extension of sympathetic subjectivity has come some moral good. Or so I told myself, as I tried to salve my conflicted heart after hearing Jennifer's humiliatingly abject thank-yous when I dropped her off.

Poverty, squalor, ignorance, want: all are, I think, offenses before God. It is a sin that any of God's children should suffer such. Jesus warned us that offenses will come--must come, in fact--but still condemned those who are instruments of their coming (Matthew 18:7). Rightly or wrongly, I feel that condemnation. It's a strange thing ("realistically" speaking, it is a nonsensical thing) to feel at fault for, or oppressed by, the stranger. But then, perhaps I'm a stranger here myself.

2004-01-11T21:38:00.000-06:00

Those white, middle-class, intellectual, colicky-baby, night-driving, open road blues

(Warning: this is, in retrospect, a weirdly pretentious post. My only excuse is that I'm functioning on about four hours of sleep a night, and my self-editing function is down. My apologies.)

As I've mentioned, our new baby Alison is colicky. Technically, it's not quite that: she has, according to her doctor, a "mild anal stricture"--she has a terrible time getting anything out, be it poop or gas. This means she spits-up often, and has frequent stomach aches and gas pains, all of which means she's frequently too uncomfortable to sleep, which makes her cranky and...well, you get the picture. Like hundreds of thousands of other parents of colicky, uptight (literally) infants, we've discovered that driving in the car is good, if temporary, relaxant. Between the vibration and the passing lights and the sound of the motor, she usually calms down (or exhausts herself screaming; that happens too) and sleeps a bit, sometimes deeply enough that we can get her into her crib without waking her. Most of the time, of course, she just wakes up as soon as I park the car. Still, either way, it's a break.

I took our first daughter, who was also colicky, out on night drives when she was an infant; at that time we lived Alexandria, VA, and I made more midnight drives around the National Mall and the monuments than I care to count. But now, in Jonesboro, AR, the land is mostly flat and empty. (The city itself has only a little over 50,000 people; any serious night drive with Alison crying in her car seat will very quickly exhaust the city limits, and I'll hit the country.) To the north there are some hills, gradually leading towards Missouri and the Ozarks, but directly west, south and east is farmland: rice to the south and west, and cotton in the Delta country to the east. The latter is where I usually go: I'm generally wiped out anyway, so the empty straight rural highways are probably safer than anything with twists and turns.

Saturday night I headed out, and since Alison was only occasionally crying I turned the radio on low. I tuned in KASU, the public station at Arkansas State University, and very reliable source of good jazz and blues. Keith Brown, a fine Memphis-based blues guitarist, was performing a set that had been recorded live in Jonesboro, and he was working through some great old numbers by Robert Johnson and Son House. As his tough, mournful voice delivered "Preachin' Blues" and other classics, I covered 20 miles or more of rural roads, passing one darkened farmhouse after another. In the distance I'd occasionally glimpse lights high above the ground; lights from a cotton mill, or a rice flour mill, or (closer in to Jonesboro) from one of food processing factories around town. After Keith's set was over, KASU served up Beale Street Caravan, a terrific blues program. Beale Street is in Memphis, only 70 miles from Jonesboro, and in the dark night I thought about all the thousands of others who have lived and worked on these ragged farms over the decades, fiddling with their radios in the evening, trying to catch some music from so-close-yet-so-far Memphis, some tune that could inspire them and sweep them away.

A friend of mine and I once argued about the blues: was it simply just a set of chord progressions, a beat that anyone could learn, or was it truly a form of folk music whose authenticity derived from its context--the cotton fields, the train whistles, the juke joints, the flat landscape, all the elements of that made of the life of so many poor rural black men and women throughout the Delta and mid-South? I'm not a philosopher of art, so I hesitate to say much about the relationship between aesthetics and identity. But I mostly defended the latter position; while forms of music and musicianship can be multiplied and reworked for as long as there are people to hear them, that shouldn't suggest that all forms of music are equally themselves in any context: blues music has traveled far and influenced many beyond these fields (and a good thing it has), but there is a sensibility to the place it emerged that makes its form, its telos, ever so clear. If that wasn't the case, why would people bother with vintage Robert Johnson recordings; why would people travel the blues trail from Natchez to Chicago? The cynical answer, I suppose, is that it's just tourism; it's just another artifact finding a way to sell itself to people (like myself) hung up on experience. There's a point to that cynicism, to be sure. But it doesn't explain the whole phenomenon; it can't entirely justify why some practioners of an art are so hung up on returning to and retrieving, again and again, that art's own roots. No, some music--maybe all music--has a home, and while being rooted in that home may not make you a better performer or critic or fan, it does help you seen something that is going on in the form, something that you may not have ever known in another context. Or at least that is what I told myself late last night, taking our '98 Ford Escort down another empty cotton field road.

Blues music came, of course, from individuals who, materially speaking, were nothing like myself: a white middle-class academic. So I'm outsider to that history, that form. But what about the emotional core? The blues communicate a sadness, and a defiance: not a heroic defiance, but instead one having to do with simple endurance. This bad thing happened, then that bad thing happened, and tomorrow another bad thing will happen again. Life is hard, but the hardest thing about it is its continuation, its repetitiveness, its inescapability. The sharecropper looked out at that flat land, and knew that the next day would be much like the one just past. To be able to do, and then do again, and then still do again...well, that's not heroism, that's just living: living without any payoff or intellectual summation or spiritual reward, living with a sense of larger things but also a feel for one's disconnect from them. You get swept away not by the evocation of an another place, but by the heaviness of what you're already in. Spelling it out like this makes it seem pathetic, I know. But I wonder if the bluesmen of old, in pounding out their songs and their lives, didn't do a great favor to people like me, by discovering and articulating in artistic form a mode of living appropriate to all of us who sometimes feel disconnected, out of place, left behind by the train. That's everyone at one point or another, I know. But, as insulting as it may be to suggest it in light of all the real suffering in the lives of so many around the U.S. and the world, perhaps there is something bluesy to the life of the typical academic today. Committed to a vocation that was imagined and set up in a different era, we find ourselves (at least the overwhelming majority of us) teaching at underfunded and overwhelmed state schools and community colleges that look nothing like the preserves of excellence that we willingly conditioned ourselves to expect; aspiring to a frankly appalling ideal of detachment (an elite, cloistered way of life) while lacking either the resources or the institutional support or the social justification for doing so. In other words, we're stuck, psychologically--and while the social forces which kept poor rural blacks stuck were in every way viciously political, social and economic, it was the psychological sense of being stuck which most inspired the blues. And so, in a small, perhaps silly way, it inspires us as well. In the meantime, we teach and write, though few of us do enough of either, and none of us do it as well as or in the way that we should. It is crumbling edifice, the academy in America is, but still an attractive one: in all honestly, for all our bitching, most of us wouldn't leave even if we could. So we keep at it, living a kind of disconnected, fractured, perpetually out-of-step life: the middle-class academic at the dawn of the 21st century. This, I guess, is our blues.

I'm driving late into the night, and I'll be up early the next morning, and I may be up in the middle of the night as well: that's just what you have to do with a colicky baby. Lesson plans aren't going to get written as well as they should, and some things won't get written at all. I hope for a better job, but the longer I live here the less I want to move. I tune into the radio, and listen for the old man to sing some song about a preacher, and a woman, and the devil, and a train, and a death letter, and when he hits the refrain everyone in the audience murmurs in response; "that's how it is," you can almost hear them say, "that's how it is, every day." Indeed it is.

2004-01-07T11:56:00.000-06:00

Update to the Update

Scott replies to my comments in another very smart post. As he notes, our disagreement (which isn't great) is at least as much terminological as it is philosophical. He writes that he is "not actually opposed to the religious arrangements in Belgium," that "Belgium's compact with the Catholic church appears to me to be a functional and fairly satisfactory compromise, and that he "would like to see European Muslims reach a functional compromise of their own." I couldn't agree more. Then he goes on to write:

"However - and here is perhaps where we differ - trying to negociate solutions within the social and historical framework you actually find yourself in is not the same as having a national identity to which someone demands that you comply....I want to make a two-fold claim: First, the standards that a society imposes on its immigrants are the product of a political compromise that follows the refusal to simply integrate. Second, since people are sometimes going to refuse to accept the culture that they are expected to integrate into, and sometimes I think they are right to refuse, the standards that a society really ought to stand its ground on should be the ones that their defenders genuinely believe ought to be universal."

Scott notes that his comments lead away from the particular issue of Islam in Europe, and towards a more philosophical consideration of relativism and universalism. This is much too large a debate to get into so casually, so let me just say that while Scott and I may have very different ontological presuppositions in regards to what it is that is called "universal" (I think, for example, following the work of such thinkers as Herder or Gadamer, that universals as such are necessarily particularized: that is, they are solely manifest as particular cultural expressions, outside of which they lose substantive form), practically speaking we mostly agree: in this case, Islamic headscarves, as opposed to say female circumcision, should not be understood to be a fundamental threat to the articulation of ways of being fully human in any European context.

Scott also adds that "whatever is determined to be Belgian should not result in the interdiction of whatever isn't Belgian....I don't see a general argument for making impositions on immigrants beyond the dual obligation, both on immigrants and their indigenous neighbours, to try to find a way to coexist." Again, we would probably disagree on some of the mechanics of "complying" with a culture, or "co-existing" with one, but I can't dispute his ideal.

(Finally, also check out Brad's excellent comment on this thread, and his World Religion class's wise take on this issue.)

2004-01-06T14:10:00.000-06:00

Update

An excellent post by Scott Martens, over at Fistful of Euros, on the creeping spread of anti-Islamic headscarf paranoia among demographically threatened, mostly secularized Europeans, this time in Belgium. I've already had my say on this issue; suffice to add that I agree completely with Scott's proposal:

"It is my hope that these kinds of laws will never be passed, and that if they are passed, that national courts will strike them down. Failing that, I hope the European Court of Human Rights will do its duty. But in the meantime, I hope that French students will take matters in their own hands. This sort of hypocritical nonsense is just begging for some civil disobedience. I suggest that French students make headscarves, yarmulkes and big crosses the fashion accessories for 2004. Make sure that no kid is cool if they don't wear something religious. Use that teenage hatred of authority to actually accomplish something."

That being said, I do thing Scott's reasoning on this issue is less than thorough: while it's certainly not wrong to interpret these kind of debates in light of women's rights and/or dress codes, he seems to me to be unaware, or at least dismissive, of how significantly the issues of nationality, secularity and identity are tied up in this argument. This is both unfortunate and odd, because a couple of points he brings up as part of his condemnation of Chrac's and others' decisions actually underline, as I see it, the abiding relevance of these very issues. For instance, he makes reference to the Catholic institutions of Belgium, how they have long since, after many long struggles, been peacefully and consensually incorporated into Belgian life, so much so that any talk of "banning the appearance of religious allegiance" would be, in Scott's view, enormously controversial. I would think properly so: identity is an ongoing argument, and the public institutions of Belgium reflect that argument, an argument which is there own, not anyone else's. In other words, these are issues which require some kind of communal, historical, and/or national context within which to be worked out: if secularism is to be achieved, it will be (whether its adherents recognize it or not) a particularized secularism. Part of what plainly bothers Scott is that these proposals to ban Muslim girls from wearing headscarves to school are not emerging from any process of particularization: their proponents are not addressing the real, varying Islamic populations of these coutnries with their disparate needs, but are rather dressing up their proposals in terms of "the defence of secularism and universal values." No wonder Scott suspects their rather empty rhetoric is a "crock of shit," a mere cover for xenophobic pandering.

Scott's second point makes this even more clear. He about how the RCMP in Canada dealt with the challenge posed by Sikh men, who always wear turbans, joining their ranks. Rather than forcing the Sikh Mounties to wear the traditional hat, or creating an arbitrary exception for them, they came up with "an official RCMP turban, made of blue cloth held together with a maple leaf pin." A brilliant solution, which correctly, as Scott concludes, "said that being Sikh is not only compatible with being Canadian, but....that there is a Canadian way to be Sikh." I couldn't agree more. But then Scott goes on to say that:

"The idea that there is some conception of Frenchness, Belgianness or even Europeanness to which immigrants must comply is an idea that deserves to be consigned to oblivion. Instead, governments ought to advance the idea that just as Arab Christians are still Arabs, and that [as] Christians in the Middle East have distinctive institutions that are different from those found in Europe, [so too] European Muslims need to have distinctive institutions of their own too. Institutions which are at once Islamic and European, which are not necessarily shared by their non-Islamic neighbours but which aren't shared by their extra-European brethren either, will do far more to advance the cause of a common identity than social integration at gunpoint ever will."

I agree with that concluding sentence--but in what sense does it require the first? On the contrary, it seems to me that if one wishes to develop, in the long term, French or Belgian or European ways of "being Muslim," then it is absolutely essential that you know what is and isn't proper (historical, particular) to that "way." There couldn't be a Canadian way to be a Sikh if there wasn't something which was properly Canadian and essentially Sikh. So, as opposed to what seems to be Scott's anti-national wishes, it is exactly the preservation (or, at least, the continuation of the argument about the nature of) Frechness, Belgianness and Europeanness which will make it possible for the rituals and institutions he hopes for to emerge. Without strong sense of the difference between one identity and another, no productive hybrids or bridges between them will emerge. Consequently, if Europe--especially the French-German-Benelux core--is to adequately respond to Islam, then it will need to ever more clearly think about and express the historical and communal particularity of its response; otherwise, the amount of denial and distrust on both sides will only grow.

2004-01-06T10:19:00.000-06:00

Reciprocity

I don't have a blogroll here, as should be apparent. Part of the reason is that, when I first designed this site, I purposefully wanted it to be as bare as possible--maybe for style reasons, or maybe just to make it different from so many other blogs which have links galore stretching for miles down their sidebars. The other reason is that I'm somewhat obsessive-compulsive about ordering my working environments, and that includes my electronic ones. I have a collection of links on my home page that I'm always tinkering with, to make sure it reflects sites that I actually visit as opposed to inactive ones or ones I've long since lost interest in. Yes, I know, everyone updates their blogroll occassionally, but I fiddle with my links practically every week, and I simply didn't want to feel obliged to go into Blogger and mess with the code on an equally regular basis. (That's also partly why there are no comments on this blog: it would only be one more thing I would feel driven to obsessively fine-tune and oversee. And my e-mail is just right there on your left, after all.) Hence, a very simple and spare blog.

That being said, I've received some nice links, referrals and comments over the last month of so (perhaps not coincidentally, while I've been writing posts that have been somewhat more personal than usual). So I thought it might be nice to note, just this once, some of the blogs I read regularly, and whose presence on the web I very much appreciate. Since I am, as the blurb at the top left puts it, primarily interested in political and philosophical matters (at least insofar as my blog writings go), many of my regular blog stops are predictable: Tacitus, Joshua Micah Marshall, Daniel Drezner, Eric Alterman, Andrew Sullivan (yes, I read them both: I'm fair and balanced), Matthew Yglesias, Oxblog, and so forth. But there are at least a few other regular stops of mine which fall outside these parameters that deserve particular note. I'm sure they are all read by more people than this blog is; still, they deserve a link.

Laura at Apartment 11D. Laura's musings on life in New York City, with small children, with diminishing academic expectations but with excitment for the future, are unfailingly funny, insightful, intelligent and sharp. More importantly, her fundamental decency always comes through. I'm unclear as to why her blogroll associates me with Bill Murray as opposed to with the Coen brothers, but I'm not one to talk.

Noah Millman at Gideon's Blog. In many ways, he's my ideal blogger. He almost never posts unless he really has something to say, and then he'll say it at length, with all ambiguities examined and very few stones left unturned. Discussions of politics, yes, but also morality, religion, fatherhood, Judaism, and many other topics. If you're interested in substantive food for thought, Noah never fails.

Timothy Burke at Easily Distracted. Timothy is very much cut from the same cloth as Noah: sometimes weeks will go by with no posts, and then he'll come forward with a brilliant little essay on class politics, or fantasy literature, or movies and gaming culture, or academia. Worth waiting for.

Speaking of academia, of course I read Invisible Adjunct. There is no other blog dedicated to academic matters that I read as regularly as I read hers. Why? Because she's can think and write about the nonsense of the academic--and the non-academic--world with both a sharp theoretical knife and grounded, humane common sense: a rare combination. She's the best example I can think of an academic who is really working through their vocation, with humor and curiosity and strong opinions. Also she's Canadian, which is almost always a plus.

The only thing better then being Canadian is being a bitter, conflicted Canadian, which is why Innocents Abroad is a great read. I can really get into a lot of the heavily theoretical posts here; while I generally don't share the conservative outlook of the blog's authors, they unapologetically employ the canon of political philosophy to make sense of matters both esoteric and banal, and I like that very much. They provide a rare, vaguely Straussian, Euro-American perspective which I've learned a lot from. And when Colin May uses his learning to diagnose what he sees as the maladies of his fellow Canucks...well, it may not be everyone's cup of tea, but I enjoy it.

A very different, but equally rare and important, Euro-American perspective is provided by the many authors over at A Fistful of Euros. As someone interested in language and politics, I particularly look forward to Scott Martens contributions.

Amy Sullivan at Political Aims. Amy diligently uses every opportunity she can find to state over and over again her very important point (insofar as American politics is concerned): that there is such a thing a "Christian left," that social justice issues are not incompatible with American Christianity, etc. Other bloggers make this point, but not with anything like Amy's determination. I sometimes doubt the coherence of her worldview, but I always learn something from her posts.

John Holbo and Belle Waring. They live in Singapore; Belle is expecting a baby (their second). Read John for the philosophy and cultural criticism; read Belle for the recipes. It's all good.

Anything else? Oh yes, Crescat Sententia. They basically just blog about sex and libertarianism, but it's entertaining, and undergraduates are allowed their obsessions, after all.

2003-12-30T13:06:00.000-06:00

A (Birth)Day in the Life

Woke up, got out of bed, dragged a comb across my head...

Not quite. I was up at midnight with Alison, who is colicky. We've been up with her a lot lately (on Christmas night--not Eve, thank goodness--we didn't get her to fall asleep until we locked her snug in her car seat and I took her for a drive all around Jonesboro at 4am). Last night was mostly my job, as Melissa has the flu, and went to bed around 9pm with a terrible case of the chills; I dug out the heating pad and piled on the blankets to help her stop shivering. Fortunately, she was able to nurse Alison around 10pm, after which I was slowly able to rock her to sleep, and actually managed to get her down by about 11pm. Megan, our oldest girl, woke up with a headache, and so I gave her some Motrin and put a cold washcloth on her head (she really likes that) and rubbed her back until she fell asleep again. That allowed me about 45 minutes of shut-eye. But then it was midnight and Alison was screaming again, and so we were both up. We can't let her scream in her crib, since Caitlyn, our second oldest, shares a bedroom with her, and Caitlyn doesn't sleep well as it is. Alison seems to have a problem similar to one Caitlyn had when she was an infant: she can't poop, at least not very well. The pressure builds up insider her little body, and it prevents her from relaxing. So, when all else fails, we will sometimes put Vaseline on the tip of a baby thermometer (which is inserted rectally, if you didn't know), and insert it in Alison's little behind in the hopes of "coaxing" something out. She hates it, and sometimes causes some inflammation, but it really helps on occasion. We tried it last night around 1am, and boy did we get a lot of crap out of her. Well, after that there was another half hour or so of slowly calming her down, while Melissa nursed her again and we both kind of half-watched The Two Towers extended edition dvd (I haven't seen Return of the King yet, and want to review both of the LOTR dvds before I do). We hit the sack, and Alison stayed down, by 1:30am. But around 5am she needed to be fed again, and plus she wouldn't go to sleep afterward (which is unusual: she's generally slept well in the early morning hours). Melissa had sweated all night and was still very tired, so I got up and rocked her in my arms until she fell asleep around 7am. By that time Caitlyn had woken up, but I'd managed to get her some juice and send her back to bed. That meant the house was quiet as it grew light outside. I've always enjoyed the early morning hours: I grew up on a farm, milked cows, and was regularly up at 5am most days for most of my adolescence. But I must admit, I never really imagined when I was a boy facing the dawn in the state I did this morning, or have so many so many mornings, since Melissa and I began having kids.

It's December 30th, and I'm 35 years old today.

The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, still is their strength labor and sorrow; for they are soon cut off, and we fly away. (Psalms 90:10)

I play little numerology games with myself. I pick out dates and find ways to imbue them with significance, to tell myself they are milestones, after which (or by which) much will be accomplished, or dangling issues will be resolved, or conflicts will be settled, or everything will change. It's a bad habit, since it allows me to rationalize away my days, filling them with excuses and promises ("Well, I needn't worry about that now; it's on my list of things to do once this/that/the other thing happens"). But it's a habit that I'm, mostly, able to keep under control; rarely these days do I allow my obsession with completed lists, clean breaks, fresh starts, do-overs and all the other strategies by which we impose a temporal order on our lives to actually get in the way of getting things done. In any case, I do it, though I'm not proud of it.

My latest milestone was my 35th birthday, since, as the scripture says, it puts me halfway toward the end of my life (or at most five years away from the halfway point, if I'm lucky). Do I believe that's true? I believe it's meaningful, which in subjective self-evaluations like these is much the same thing. I'm 35; I'm a thirtysomething. By no means a bad age; it's a good one, really (youth is overrated, your 20s especially so). It bothers me how far I'm from where I feel I ought to be though. I told myself that this was really the do-or-die-year: I'd have a tenure-track offer in hand by the time I was 35, I promised myself, or else. Well, no such offer has been made. Still a visiting professor; still renting a house; still living on the edge (no savings, no life insurance). Ten years of marriage, three children, a (paid off, thank goodness) 98 Ford Escort in the driveway. Living in Northeast Arkansas, and deeply confused and divided in how I feel about the place. I haven't been able to provide a home of our own for my wife and children, something they want more than probably just about anything else (in ten years of marriage, we've rented and lived in a total of nine separate homes and apartments, not one of which she's been free to paint or significantly redecorate or even plant a garden around, all of which she longs to be able to do). My first book should have been done a year ago, and I've only just managed to get a single article out of my dissertation; how can I ever expect to make tenure, to create any lasting scholarship, become a truly fine teacher, much less provide well for my family, when I already find myself so far behind where I ought to be?

I'm whining, of course. And I hate the fact that I whine. Ridiculous: many people--most people--are worse off. I see them at church, I see them in my classes: people with deaths in the family, jobs that disappear, bodies broken in accidents and ruined by disease, minds cast into depression by divorce and abuse. I'll probably never make it to a top research university: I don't work (and perhaps don't want to work) that hard, not with all the costs involved, and besides, I started too late, too far from the action, and I faced (and embraced) too many distractions along the way. But that's a pathetic thing to concern oneself with on one's birthday. My children are healthy (mostly). My wife is happy (I hope). My students (some of them, anyway) have learned some things in my classes. We live in a good community, and the folks from our neighborhood and church (most of them, anyway) are good people who have shared their time and hospitality with us. I have an office, and shelves full of books, and a blog and friends that I talk with by e-mail every day. Alison will be blessed in church next Sunday, and all six of my brothers, plus my mother and father, plus my younger sister and her new fiance, plus Melissa's mother and father and younger sister, will be making the journey for the big day (plus all us Fox brothers will all go see Return of the King together on Saturday night). There's a great deal more that a 35-year-old could ask for than all this, of course, and when I look around the blogosphere, and invariably compare myself to all the immensely accomplished, intelligent, ambitious, decent and influential people out there, all of whom seem far further along their chosen lifepath than I am along mine, at a far younger age, the ressentiment boils up. Thankfully however, it rarely stays at a boil. I'm 35, and my many lists are incomplete, and there is probably no more likelihood that things will dramatically and effortlessly change for the better tomorrow than there was yesterday. Most things, I suppose, will remain undone, and most of my days will be ordinary days, this day included. I know that, and am happy with that more often than not: and when I remember at the scriptures, which remind us to "take no thought for the morrow" (Matthew 6:34), and when I look around me, and see so many consumed by an envious, selfish and prideful pursuit of ever-better tomorrows, I realize that the fact that I can be happy with my day is perhaps my greatest blessing of all. The philosophical libertine, who thinks life is simply there for the taking and believes limits are for chumps, will no doubt find my birthday reflections maudlin. And of course, they are. But there are worse things to be.

Melissa was finally able to get herself out of bed around 9am this morning, by which time both Megan and Caitlyn were up and watching tv, which is usually frowned upon around here (in the morning, that is; we try to ration out tv time in the afternoons), but since its vacation and no one really had a good night sleep, I figured what the hell. Hopefully Melissa's flu is passing, though she still has a bad cough. Alison slept until 9:30am, and we all had cold cereal for breakfast. I need to do some shopping, in preparation for all the family which is coming to visit, but thought I'd come up to the office for a few hours this morning, and try to bang out this book review for The Review of Politics which I was supposed to have finished two weeks ago. Then Megan shouted "The toilet's overflowing!" Out came the plunger and the mop. We need to clean the place before the guests arrived, so it was as good a time as any to wash the bathroom floor. After that was done, and Melissa started the laundry, I came up to my office, and wrote this (what did I say about my embracing distractions?). Later today, we'll open some presents, and we'll have some cake and ice cream. The girls will put the big "3" and "5" candles on my cake, and I'll blow them out. What will I wish for? More days like today, I think, though perhaps with slightly more sleep.

Happy New Year, everyone. And many happy returns.

2003-12-24T08:00:00.000-06:00

Eddi's Service

This is my favorite Christmas poem. It's funny, and bittersweet, and captures very well, I think, the transcendent point of the humble event at the heart of this holiday, a point powerfully expressed in the carol "In the Bleak Midwinter" when we sing:

What can I give Him / Poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd / I would give a lamb.
If I were a wise man / I would do my part;
Yet what I can I give Him: / Give my heart.

That is, we give whatever we can, to whomever we can. He will always receive it (Matt. 25:40).

Also, as someone who grew up on a farm and milked cows on many Christmas Eves and Christmas mornings, I appreciate the reverence of the animals in the poem; for of course, as we all know, at midnight on Christmas Eve all animals can talk. Enjoy, and have a merry and blessed Christmas holiday.

Eddi's Service, by Rudyard Kipling

(A.D. 687)

Eddi, priest of St. Wilfrid
In his chapel at Manhood End,
Ordered a midnight service
For such as cared to attend.

But the Saxons were keeping Christmas,
And the night was stormy as well.
Nobody came to service,
Though Eddi rang the bell.

"Wicked weather for walking,"
Said Eddi of Manhood End.
"But I must go on with the service
For such as care to attend."

The altar-lamps were lighted --
An old marsh-donkey came,
Bold as a guest invited,
And stared at the guttering flame.

The storm beat on at the windows,
The water splashed on the floor,
And a wet, yoke-weary bullock
Pushed in through the open door.

"How do I know what is greatest,
How do I know what is least?
That is My Father's business,"
Said Eddi, Wilfrid's priest.

"But -- three are gathered together --
Listen to me and attend.
I bring good news, my brethren!"
Said Eddi of Manhood End.

And he told the Ox of a Manger
And a Stall in Bethlehem,
And he spoke to the Ass of a Rider,
That rode to Jerusalem.

They steamed and dripped in the chancel,
They listened and never stirred,
While, just as though they were Bishops,
Eddi preached them The Word.

Till the gale blew off on the marshes
And the windows showed the day,
And the Ox and the Ass together
Wheeled and clattered away.

And when the Saxons mocked him,
Said Eddi of Manhood End,
"I dare not shut His chapel
On such as care to attend."

2003-12-22T15:46:00.000-06:00

A Christmas Carol Review

There is no Christmas story I love more than Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol. In my mind it is practically scripture, a story whose truth-telling power is comparable to that of the parable of the prodigal son. Why? This article puts the story’s appeal succinctly, but there's more to be said regarding each point. To wit:

Moral resonance. Well yes–it's a powerful tale of redemption, and a chilling ghost story too. The moral force of A Christmas Carol, the language of dread and relief which Dickens worked into his little book, often strikes contemporary readers as strange, since for us all the 19th-century signs and elements of death and the grave which Dickens employed–the white shroud, the rattling wheels of the hearse–appear distant and therefore easily denied. But Dickens's world was one that still knew very, very well how close the other side is, how a chill or a cough could send one on to one's reward. The medieval morality, mystery and passion plays all depended, to one degree or another, on the nearness of the unseen world, of the judgment which stood ever present as we make our way through the world. Modern day ghost stories generally fail to call up an awareness of mortality, which is our loss. To the extent that Dickens, through the power of his plot and his words, can get 21st-century readers to remember, in the words of scripture, that "if we do not improve our time while in this life, then cometh the night of edarkness wherein there can be no labor performed"–then his book is worth its weight in gold.

Victorian truisms. I won’t go too far into philosophy here: suffice to say that it is not unreasonable to have a view of history which allows one to discern in particular moments of historical development truths that last–not just for material reasons, but because, embedded as they are in particular historical and cultural constructions, they nonetheless are a kind of "epiphanic truth": a revelatory insight into something which was always there and always will be, even if apart from our language and perspectives we cannot see it entirely for what it "really" is. (Charles Taylor is the best exponent this kind of expressivist theology, though he is only refining what the Romantics discovered first.) What’s my point? My point is that a Victorian Christmas is just one of hundreds of possible Christmases from across the whole breadth and history of Christendom: and yet, it is not unreasonable to say that those busy-body Victorians–and most especially Charles Dickens–got something about Christmas right. The Ghost of Christmas Present is perhaps the closest approximation we are likely ever to get of that gift-giving figure who haunts all our stories about the holiday: a spirit of charity, full of laughter but also a hard work ethic, with a kind of reforming earnestness, resulting in the consecration of that revelry which once typified Christmas into a force for spreading cheer and doing good. One can get Marxist and talk until endlessly about how Christmas was domesticated, turned into a private merchandising opportunity, but in the end that misses something essential–that there is a spiritual force behind the sharing, the giving and receiving, of the goods of the earth.

Theology. While it is true that Christ makes no appearance in A Christmas Carol, at least not as the Savior. But there is far more God and heaven in Dickens’s story than one might at first suspect: Jacob Marley laments that he never raised his eyes "to that blessed Star which led the Wise Men to a poor abode"; the Ghost of Christmas Present condemns those who act selfishly in God's name; and Scrooge himself, after his encounter with the last spirit, falls to his knees in prayer. Most importantly, there is something powerfully true about the vision Scrooge is shown out his bedroom window by Jacob Marley: thousands of condemned spirits, no longer able to interfere with the living, bound in fetters (some singly, others linked together: "they might be guilty governments," Dickens perceptively added), condemned to make this world their abode forever, and never rise up to a higher place. Secular audiences today take such scenes in stride, as part of some pop-horror story mythos; but of course, those with a Christian bent can readily respond to the scriptural imagery: this the earth will become a hell, a prison, for those who place their treasure within it.

Well, all that and more can be said for the book. But most of us know the story through it’s many adaptations. How do those stack up? I can think of five worth mentioning:

The Muppet Christmas Carol. Yes, I'm serious. One of the problems with adapting A Christmas Carol is that Dickens wrote the book to a great extent as if it were to be read aloud; and, in fact, for many years afterward he did do public readings of the book, and he made great use of the descriptive action and imagery he had larded into the text. The problem is that so much of that imagery simply doesn't work outside a narrator describing and commenting upon it; there's only so far you can go in putting those words into characters' mouths. That's what makes makes this version so good, completely aside from the various characterizations the muppets artists were able to pull off and the wacky humor without: Gonzo, playing Charles Dickens, gets to narrate the story to a certain extent. While this particular adaptation takes great liberty with the text (obviously!), the presence of a narrator means some of Dickens's beautiful and sharp language gets to be preserved. (I love the line about Scrooge being "solitary as an oyster.") And by the way, Michael Caine's is wonderful--while this version doesn't get the transformation of his character especially well (preferring humor instead, of course), the opening scenes are great, with Caine's wicked grin digging into lines like "Christmastime is harvest season for the money lenders." Good stuff.

A Christmas Carol, Alastair Sim version. Some people consider this the definitive version; I don't. There's much to like about it--it goes farther than many adaptations do insofar as capturing the theology behind the story. And I like some of their additions to the story (like making Scrooge's long lost love Belle--for some reason renamed "Alice"--into a Salvation Army-type missionary, working among the poor whom Scrooge is taken to visit by the Ghost of Christmas Present). But some of the others are distracting (a very 1950s pseudo-Marxist subplot on how Scrooge embraces the "modern economy" and turns against the "old ways," for example). And frankly, I can't get a bead on Alastair Sims's Scrooge--what kind of person is he, and how he fits the story. There are, as I see it, basically two possible interpretations of Scrooge which can work within the tale Dickens told; the first is best exemplified by...

Scrooge, starring Albert Finney. This is a great musical, with superb and touching songs ("Happiness" is a great love ballad; my sister sang it at a recital she gave years ago) and wonderful acting. Just about everyone in the movie is some sort of Cockney, and the harsh accents nicely contrast with the beautiful waifs they cast as children. (The Timy Tim in this version is heartbreaking.) I dislike Alec Guiness's Marley intensely; he seems to be winking at the audience throughout, and the whole "Scrooge goes to hell" sequence is just silly. But Finney, and the design team who dressed him and created sets for him, absolutely nailed one possible reading of Scrooge: namely, that he's a horrible, wretched, lousy little man, a "squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner," as Dickens wrote. Finney's Scrooge is a pathetic, bottom-feeding crook, fussing about the binding on his ledgers, double and triple locking everything, driving people to despair over a pound here and a pound there, all while wandering about and chanting the song "I Hate People." Rich, delightful stuff. The only problem with this approach, when you reflect upon it, is that such a hideous old man has no stature, and consequently his salvation seems to come at little cost: there is no real tragedy is such a Scrooge. Perhaps those responsible for the adaptation realized this, and thus were consistent when they ended the musical with basically a big party, with Scrooge running about in a Father Christmas outfit, handing out presents left and right. In any case it works, though it's not my favorite.

A Christmas Carol, Patrick Stewart version. This version certainly has a lot going for it, most particularly Stewart's performance. I wish I could have seen his one-man show of the story. Stewart's Scrooge has something of the creepy miser about him, but he doesn't take it as far Finney did. What Stewart does to very, very well is show the emotional and psychological transitions very well: this adaptation gives Scrooge a chance to interrogate himself as he goes along, wondering if things really were so much better when he was younger, and then condemning the man he has become that much more when honesty forces to him to realize all that he had lost. His "reborn" Scrooge throws himself into his new life with energy, but also doubt: he doesn't know how to be good, and so he is always apologizing, looking around him, laughing at his own confusion. In this sense the Stewart adaptation does better than any other at capturing a point often missed from the conclusion of the story: the fact that "some people laughed to see the alteration in [Scrooge], but he let them laugh, and little heeded them...his own heart laughed: and that was quite enough for him." In other words, there are other Scrooges, and people who will judge and mock those who repent and change; Dickens knew this, and acknowledging it is an important part of the story. Unfortunately, the rest of the production pales beside Stewart, I think: the special effects are poorly edited and inconsistent; the effort to spread the story out, to capture a lot of the breadth Dickens packed in there, make it seem rushed to me. I just don't think the people behind it had much vision of how to tell the story besides keeping the camera on Stewart. This is in direct contrast to the adaption I consider the greatest...

A Christmas Carol, George C. Scott version. Just about perfect. The other great interpretation of Scrooge is the opposite of the wheezing miser approach: you make Scrooge a competent, indeed masterful, capitalist, a man of force and pride. Dickens signalled this possibility from the very first page of A Christmas Carol, when he noted that "Scrooge's name was good upon Exchange, for anything he chose to put his hand to." Scott's Scrooge is not angry with the world; rather, he wearily and condescendingly mocks it, confused (and delighted) at its willingness to babble on about all this Christmas nonsense. He drives hard bargains at the stock market, refusing to budge on the price of corn, demanding cash payments. He is, more than any other Scrooge in any other adaptation, genuinely horrified by the way his personal belongings will be disposed of after his death, should be go ahead and die hated and unmourned. Some may find this version too austere and serious, perhaps full of itself. (Bob Cratchit and his family are an awesomely dignified lower-class bunch.) I adore it, however, because it underscores the seriousness of the story. (Also, such stiffness is kind of necessary for the dramatic conventions of the story to work: how else could Scrooge not know that it is signs of his own death--or, as is implied in this version, delude himself into thinking otherwise--unless Scrooge himself is to a degree willfully blind?) It builds the tension, I think, and draws you in, so that when Scrooge leans over his own grave and stares up at the skeletal Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, imploring "Let me sponge away the writing on this stone!" I can't help but weep. I mean it--this version is Christmas television at its very, very best.

2003-12-19T13:47:00.000-06:00

Thoughts on the EU

Since I've written before on the issue of Europe and its "identity crisis," I'd thought I'd chime in a little bit on the recent collapse of talks on finalizing the proposed European Union constitution. My thoughts were crystallized by a couple of intriguing posts; one by Maria Farrell over at Crooked Timber, the other by Nick Barlow at A Fistful of Euros. Nick's piece is better I think; while Maria's comments provide an interesting take on some dynamics internal to life in the divided patchwork of nations which is Europe today, Nick's puts the larger issues which are at the heart of the struggle over the EU into what I see as their appropriate context.

For Maria, the big story is that Italy blew it, demonstrating once again that the European Union is often more hurt than helped by the excessive involvement of larger states (namely, France, Italy, Great Britain and Germany) who are "always running off in triumvirates, or quadriviates or what have you every 5 minutes and declaring themselves the engine of Europe." Maria doesn't get into the particulars of the debate in Rome, which dealt at length with the relative voting weights of countries of different sizes within the constitutional structure, but it surely must be part of her thinking when she emphasizes the need to recognize "the big role that smaller countries play in greasing the wheels of the European machine." As she concludes, "as of 1st May next year, small countries will be in the majority of EU member states...and we're here to stay." Her attitude is certainly an admirable one, one that fits well with the aggressive stance taken by some of the larger "small" countries, such as Poland and Spain, in defending the agreements by which they first entered the EU. One might even attribute to it a kind of "republicanism" of the sort which informed the original creation of the U.S. Senate: namely, that every body of citizens, in their separate states, has a sovereign standing on the basis of their particular identity and the particular contributions they can make to the union overall. Unfortunately, Maria uses that discomforting word "machine" when referring to the EU in general, and I don't think that's an innocent term. There isn't anything organic to Maria's interest in working out the relations between smaller and larger European countries; the problems facing the EU, and their resolution, exist for her on what seems to be an essentially organizational or institutional plane. And looking at the U.S. Senate, or any kind of federal arrangement within a single union, without also thinking theoretically about the "identity" (historical, moral, cultural, even spiritual) of that union is simply begging for trouble. (The fact that such a common understanding of the res publica is no longer a particularly strong feature of American constitutional thinking is one of the reasons why such nominally or outwardly "republican" arrangements like the senate, or the electoral college, strike so many as unfair and incomprehensible: absent an organic perspective on the polity itself, all that remains is internal democratic struggles, in which case why not just level out all particular differences under a single system?) (This is not, by the way, to expressly defend these arrangements; it is only to point out what is necessary to appreciate and evaluate them.)

Nick does a better job of appreciating and evaluating the real nature of that "trouble" which as-yet-somewhat-identity-less Europe actually faces in its efforts to build a better union. Quoting at length an article by Max Hastings, Nick talks about why it is imperative that Europhiles like himself present an "alter-European" argument: one that, in other words, defends the idea of the EU, but backs away from this particular manifestation of it. "The problem comes," he writes, "from the fact that while there is a growing sense of a common European cultural identity, it's in danger of being swamped by an overly techno-bureaucratic notion of integration being imposed from above....at some point in the future, there will be [a] belief [in a common European identity] present, but that it is not plausible to assign that belief and expectation now." Nick also correctly notes that the "Europe" on behalf of which its member states will ultimately be willing to rethink their own sovereignty in relationship to must offer something positive, something which is essentially a cultural and popular affirmation, rather than an elite declaration of what Europe isn't (i.e., Bush's America). In this context, I would agree with one of Nick's commentators, who asks just "what is so terrible about a 'two speed' Europe" in the first place. I think this is an important question. Many dislike this idea; the notion that France and Germany (various described or self-described as the "core" of the EU, the "avant-garde" of Europe) would go ahead with further integration, without necessarily drawing other European nations into similar arrangements, seems to many as a recipe for bullying. No doubt lingering bitterness fire much of this suspicion; so do the legitimate fears of smaller European countries. On the other hand, it must be noted that this isn't just a "big power" European pact: it is widely understood that Belgium, Luxembourg and perhaps the Netherlands would join France and Germany in any such arrangement. In other words, what we're talking about here is the French-German-Benelux--that part of Europe which already has gone farthest in developing what might be considered a "nationality." Forget about Maria's focus on Europe's strategic machinery; think about this instead, for example, in the context of the debate over the appearance of some reference to Christianity in the EU Constitution: for better or worse, hostility and sympathy to the idea breaks down very neatly along various existing national lines, with France, Belgium and Luxembourg being among the idea's strongest opponents. Now, as I just wrote, I'm not very impressed with secularism as a cultural marker of identity--but one can't dismiss its presence as a real cultural commonality. Simply put, some parts of Europe are much closer to being able to pull off a historical embrace of a kind of "European nationality" than others; why should one object to the further development of a union in such places, where the necessary identity is at least plausible? That may depress some Europhiles, for whom the whole idea is to go "post-political," and be "united in diversity." Good Herderian that I am, I don't think such unity is impossible. But it is far more likely to be possible when there is some communal--or go ahead and say it: national--identification with what that public "unity" substantively is. Consequently, if the current failure of EU talks sparks a greater desire to build on the substantive unity that already exists in (some) places, rather than waiting for it to appear in all places, I wonder if this debacle won't turn out to have a very important silver lining after all.

2003-12-17T23:44:00.000-06:00

No, Not Fraternity Either...

I was going to write on President Jacques Chirac's wrong-headed (and perhaps irrational as well; see below) decision to endorse a proposed ban on "blatant" religious garb or symbols in French schools (and perhaps hospitals and other venues as well) anyway, but Jacob T. Levy managed to find someone to hold his place in line for The Return of the King (which, alas, recent obligations prevent me from seeing opening night) long enough for him to thoroughly denounce it. Jacob and I have disagreed on more than a few things, but here I couldn't agree with him more. As he points out:

"The proposed law is really quite repressive. One item that hasn't been much mentioned in the English-language press is that it also prohibits wearing any visible political symbol (buttons and badges and so on). One article I read about that proposal in Le Monde last week made quite clear how arbitrarily that will be enforced, with school administrators drawing their distinctions between what is and what isn't political. An AIDS ribbon? An anarchist's A button? A button in support of SOS-Racisme? One administrator said that that wouldn't be prohibited, because anti-racism, isn't a political value but a republican value. But the ban clearly isn't restricted to a bright-line rule against partisan affiliations, either. It is going to leave tremendous discretion in the hands of principals to ban what they dislike and allow what they like."

You could really go on for a while in response to that, trying to figure out the best way to make sense of the claim that some position may be "republican" but isn't "political." (Clearly it has at least something to do with the current French desire, common to many Western Europeans, to see its polity as somehow "postnational," or even "postpolitical".) Regardless, Jacob has hit the nail on the head: the idea of liberty (personal as well as religious) will be profoundly harmed by the passage of this legislation. (His comments about the consequences of this law, in terms of the actual burdens it will place of faithful Muslims and Jews as opposed to Christians, as well as the dismissiveness its language shows towards real and presumably visible differences between varieties of Islam, are dead-on as well.)

But what about the other two values of the revolution: equality and fraternity? Jacob expresses dismay at what he takes to be the knee-jerk collectivism of both supporters and opponents of this legislation:

"People say, in all apparent good faith, things that I just can't imagine a reasonable person believing. [Their] understanding of separation and religious liberty is compatible with state action in support of Christianity, like public Christmas displays on government property. It's compatible with the creation of official government-sponsored governing and lobbying bodies for the major religious communities. But it's incompatible with individuals manifesting their religious faith in any noticeable way....It is, always, all about France and the French state, never about the conflicting obligations in conscience felt by committed religious believers."

As a religious communitarian who is willing to reflect on the point of (mild forms of) establishmentarianism, one might think that I would defend France here. And I do--up to a point. To President Chirac--and, apparently, a large majority of French citizens--an individual commitment to a certain kind of secularism is part of the nation's identity, it's "soul." The affective ties of Frenchness, in other words, have been historically constructed around personal anti-clericism: the idea that it is simply wrong to be able to, as Chirac put it, "immediately see what religious faith [a person] belong[s] to" by virtue of their appearance or actions. State involvement in, or even sponsorship of, religious organizations or rituals is perfectly compatible, and perhaps even forms a reasonable compromise with, such a personal ethic of assimilation. In that sense, should communitarians respect this decision as a proper defense of French fraternity?

No, for two reasons. First, because it may not even be reasonable; on the contrary, it may be a foolish way to shore up French identity. France is now about 8 percent Muslim, with probably over 6 million practicing Muslims in the country (and some observers believe the number is likely much higher than that). That is, the context within which individual French citizens may express and see reflected their identity has changed. Contexts always change, of course (which is why the better national communitarians, like Johann Gottfried Herder, refused to tie the idea of a people's "essence" to anything historically permanent), but this has been a especially dramatic one, and for better or worse it is the political reality of France. Chirac in his speech spoke of "equality of opportunity" being furthered by this recommitment to secularism, but he also denounced "communalism"--that is, that different communities might develop so that they become French in different ways. Since what is plainly at issue here is one very significant demographic and religious change in the context of French identity-formation, Chirac's refusal of communalistic approaches is hardly an equitable one; it is, on the contrary, one step away from simple majoritarianism, which as far as I'm concerned those who support the development of actual communal virtues should oppose. Perhaps there is more to the law than that; perhaps there is something there besides a desperate demographic response to the (legitimate) threat of Islamic fundamentalism. But I suspect not.

Second, even if the law is a reasonable articulation of French communitarian goals (which I doubt), their goals themselves are lousy. Simply put, secularism always has been a poor tool for solidarity. One could score cheap (though perhaps justifiable) points along these lines by pointing to the abysmal lack of "solidarity" manifest during last summer's heat wave in France, in comparison to other nations which haven't severed their ties to their religious heritage quite so firmly, but far more relevant (to my mind at least) is the simple truism that religious identity is almost inevitably communal: even mystics gather in groups. Of course rival groups can lead to Balkanization, but still: religion (even when the habits of faith are "merely" ethical or social, rather than pious, for any particular individual) directs the inner person outward, towards an engagement with others, and why would anyone want to premise their social existence on an ideal which rejects personal manifestations of that public fact? This is a lesson as old as Tocqueville's writings on civic religion, and the evidence in support of his old thesis is plentiful; it's remarkable that France, of all places, was so desperate to reject the Catholic establishment that they forgot all about the insights of their native son. No, religious communities are not necessarily "better" communities, but an aggressively irreligious community--especially one which actually goes so far as to label, as Chirac did, individual expressions of religious faith to themselves be "an aggression"!--is a dubious accomplishment, at best. So the fact that this particular response to one aspect of France's (and to a certain extent, all of Western Europe's) identity crisis is so popular among French citizens is doubly distressing: because it is likely a poor way to negotiate that crisis, and because it moves, I think, in the wrong direction entirely anyway.

2003-12-10T12:45:00.000-06:00

Update

Still more on the Christmas theme...the Invisible Adjunct reluctantly confesses that, try as she might, the old Rankin-Bass stop-motion production of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, which lurked so large in her childhood memory, turned out to be "embarrasingly unwatchable" when she put it on for her husband and child (who, wisely, ignored it, instinctively recognizing that other Rankin-Bass stuff must be much better than their Rudolph nonsense, which is true). Much discussion about pop culture Christmas memories ensued. Read it, especially all the comments.

2003-12-09T17:37:00.000-06:00

A Christmas Stories Review

Following up on my post on some of my favorite Christmas recordings, I wanted to list some of my favorite Christmas stories (and, when appropriate, editions of those stories). Of course, these are even more innumerable and varied than Christmas songs. Moreover, perhaps even more than music, holiday stories exist on a wholly sentimental plane--between the words and plots and the characters, and the way they work upon our memories, our hopes, and our perceptions of our environment, we find ourselves moved, or not. Musical recordings, even of carols, can be critiqued to a degree, but what can you can you say about Christmas tales? That they're badly written? That the moral of the story was inadequately supported? Almost by definition, when you're talking about a genre like this (equal parts inspiration and folk), such criticisms are besides the point. So take that as a warning: this is simply a list of fine Christmas stories, all of which have helped, and still help, me get into the spirit of the season. And consequently, I'm not going to talk about them, the way I did about musical recordings. Rather, I'm going to quote passages. Either you'll get it, or you won't.

(Also, a second warning: Melissa and I have kids, and we've been reading to them since they were tots, so many of the following are usually classified as "children's literature." Not that that should keep you away from them.)

1. Hans Christian Anderson, The Little Match Girl.
"The little girl stretched out both her hands towards the candles--then out went the match. All the Christmas candles rose higher and higher, till she saw that they were only the twinkling stars. One of them fell and made a bright streak across the sky. Someone is dying, thought the little girl, for her old grandmother, the only person who had ever been kind to her, used to say, 'When a star falls, a soul is going up to God.'"

2. Truman Capote, A Christmas Memory.
"'Buddy, are you awake?' It is my friend, calling from her room, which is next to mine; and an instant later she is sitting on my bed holding a candle. 'Well, I can't sleep a hoot,' she declares. 'My mind's jumping like a jack rabbit. Buddy, do you think Mrs. Roosevelt will serve our cake at dinner?' We huddle in the bed, and squeezes my hand I-love-you. 'Seems like your hand used to be so much smaller. I guess I hate to see you grow up. When you're grown up, will we still be friends?' I say always. 'But I feel so bad, Buddy. I wanted so bad to give you a bike. I tried to sell my cameo papa gave me. Buddy'--she hesitates, as though embarrassed--'I made you another kite.' Then I confess that I made her one too; and we laugh."

3. Dr. Seuss, How the Grinch Stole Christmas!
"And the Grinch, with his grinch-feet ice-cold in the snow, stood puzzling and puzzling: 'How could it be so? It came without ribbons! It came without tags! It came without packages, boxes or bags!' And he puzzled three hours, till his puzzler was sore. Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn't before! 'Maybe Christmas,' he thought, 'doesn't come from a store. Maybe Christmas...perhaps...means a little bit more!'"

4. Laura Ingalls Wilder, Santa Comes to Little House.
"Laura and Mary never would have looked in their stockings again. The cups and the cakes and the candy were almost too much. They were too happy to speak. But Ma asked if they were sure the stockings were empty. Then they put their hands down inside them, to make sure. And in the very toe of each stocking was a shining bright, new penny! They had never even thought of such a thing as having a penny. Think of having a whole penny for your very own. Think of having a cup and a cake and a stick of candy and a penny! There had never been such a Christmas."

5. Raymond Briggs, The Snowman.
[There are no words in this beautiful, whimsical picture book, which is certainly not only for children. The story only remotely has to do with Christmas (the video version adds a bit more Christmas stuff, along with a haunting piano tune from George Winston), but it is magical, warm, and ultimately deeply sobering. A warning if you have a sensitive child: a four-year-old I used to babysit would bawl uncontrollably when we turned the final page of this book.]

6. O. Henry, The Gift of the Magi.
"At seven o'clock the coffee was made and the frying pan was on the back of the stove hot and ready to cook the chops. Jim was never late. Della doubled the fob chain in her hand and sat on the corner of the table near the door that he always entered. Then she heard his step on the stair away down on the first flight, and she turned white for just a moment. She had a habit of saying little silent prayers about the simplest everyday things, and now she whispered: 'Please God, make him think I am still pretty.'"

7. Chris Van Allsburg, The Polar Express.
"The North Pole. It was a huge city standing alone at the top of the world, filled with factories where every Christmas toy was made. At first we saw no elves. 'They are gathering at the center of the city,' the conductor told us. 'That is where Santa will give the first gift of Christmas.' 'Who receives the first gift?' we all asked. The conductor answered, 'He will choose one of you.'"

8. Irene Trevas, Emma's Christmas.
"On the twelfth day of Christmas a very weary Emma climbed up to the hayloft for some sleep. But over the snowy hills she saw: twelve leaping lords, eleven dancing ladies, ten drumming drummers, nine piping pipers, eight milkmaids with cows, seven laying geese, six swimming swans, five pages bearing five golden rings, four calling birds, three French hens, two turtle doves, and--just behind the pear tree and its partridge--the prince himself, smiling his funny smile. In spite of herself, Emma was enchanted."

9. Rudyard Kipling, Eddi's Service
[A beautiful, humble, wise poem, available in many collections. Perfect for Christmas Eve. "The altar-lamps were lighted / An old marsh-donkey came / Bold as a guest invited / And stared at the guttering flame. / The storm beat on at the windows / The water splashed on the floor / And a wet, yoke-weary bullock / Pushed in through the open door. / 'How do I know what is greatest / How do I know what is least? / That is My Father's business' / Said Eddi, Wilfrid's priest. / 'But -- three are gathered together -- / Listen to me and attend. / I bring good news, my brethren!' / Said Eddi of Manhood End."]

10. Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol.
[Available in more editions than can be counted. Perhaps the greatest secular (or is it?) Christmas tale of all time--and one important enough to me that I'll need to do more than just quote from it. But that's for another post.

2003-12-09T16:01:00.000-06:00

Fatherhood, Again

Thanks for the kind comments and congratulations from so many of you. The last few days have been, as you might imagine, rather exhausting. Melissa and I have managed to have our three children far enough apart (there is an average of about 3 years, 7 months between them) that we have felt as though we were relearning everything that we should have figured out (at least once, if not twice) before. Not that it all seems "new," necessarily: just, well, unexpected. As if we were going around saying--when fitting the baby into the car seat, or changing her diaper, or trying to get her to burp, or rocking her in our arms, trying to get her to go to go back to sleep after a 2am feeding--Oh, wait, this again?

For what it's worth, yes, I get up with Melissa for those 2am feedings, maybe rubbing her feet while she nurses Alison, though admittedly I often fall right back to sleep. I take my turn at rocking our little baby, cleaning her up, keeping the other girls from pouncing on her and treating her like a doll, and so forth. Does that make ours an egalitarian, "modern" marriage? Beats me. I know it's not how my father did it (I grew up in a family of nine kids, and for most of it my mother was very much on her own); but at the same time, it's how just about all of my brothers approach child-rearing duties with their wives. We're all a bunch of early rising, diaper-washing, bottle-warming husbands, though I hardly mean to imply that we perfectly shoulder our share of the responsibilities. Still, the trend is consistent enough to suggest that fatherhood, for many of us of my generation at least, means something much more egalitarian than it used to.

I suppose I could write a lot on this topic (and may later, sometime when I'm getting more than 3 hours of sleep a night), but for now, just about everything I can think of saying has already been said, in a fine essay published in First Things by a close friend of mine, Damon Linker. The essay, "Fatherhood, 2002," is a wise, reflective, incisive look at the needs and hopes of most of those who are becoming parents (and particularly fathers) at this moment in our history. While Damon and his wife Beth are just rookies at the parenting game, I've yet to read any single essay that expressed my own aspirations, and self-understanding, in regards to being a father as well as this one did. Enjoy.

(Oh, and given that Damon's vision of fatherhood is not only a relatively egalitarian one, and includes a nod towards the need for more and better family-friendly policies in our society, the essay came in for a fair amount of criticism from the many conservative readers of First Things. While several of the correspondents made interesting points, more than a few charged Damon, essentially, with being a (forgive the crude language, but its accurate) unmanly, pussy-whipped, New Agey drip, singularly ignorant of the "real world" of masculine parenting. Not only can I testify that such isn't the case, but Damon ably demonstrated such in his response to his critics, here. Nothing like a little intergenerational argument to liven up your day.)

2003-12-05T16:35:00.000-06:00

We've Been Busy...

Just to explain my most recent absence...Melissa gave birth to Alison Edra Fox at 2:36pm this afternoon, CST. She weighs 7 lbs. 9 ounces, has a lot of hair, and all her fingers and toes. Melissa is doing fine, and we're all very, very happy. More reports as they become available....

2003-12-02T11:14:00.000-06:00

Times and Seasons

I'm not sure any of the 20 or so people who somewhat regularly check out this blog come by for commentary on Mormon matters, but just in case any of you do, you probably won't see any more of that here. I've joined a group blog named Times and Seasons dedicated to exploring Mormon theology, faith, and culture; all my Mormon-specific religious musings (and perhaps more general religious thoughts as well) will henceforth be posted over there. This blog will remain, as the blurb says, devoted to matters philosophical, political, and personal. Enjoy!

2003-12-01T00:02:00.000-06:00

A Christmas Music Review

Spend any time around Melissa and I, and you'll discover pretty quickly that, when it comes to day-to-day family things, we're a pretty sentimental and traditional couple. This is never clearer than at the holiday season, during which we and the girls delight in all sorts of rituals and kitsch. We kick off the family Christmas season on November 30th, St. Andrew's Day, by getting out all the Christmas decorations and spending a few hours transforming the house. Go ahead, be cynical; doesn't hurt me a bit.

One of the things I enjoy most about getting into all those boxes is pulling out the holiday music which I haven't listened to in a year. Some of it is, I'll admit, mediocre, but some of it is fantastic stuff. And it occurred to me that, while I'm sure plenty exist somewhere on the internet, I've never read a list of favorite Christmas recordings. And so, I determined to sit down and write one. Take it for what it's worth. In no particular order, the best holiday music we have (and the recordings I'd happily recommend to anyone) includes the following:

1. Wassail! Wassail! Early American Christmas Music, by John Langstaff and the Christmas Revels. Not everything on this delightful collection of folk music is holiday-related, or even seasonal, but it all holds together. A great celebration of Americana, including early Native American, African-American, colonial, and frontier folk songs and poetry, ranging from the Igulik in the far north, south to Kentucky Appalachia. It includes a haunting rendition (Langstaff's solo baritone, accompanied on dulcimer) of one version of "The Cherry Tree Carol," a beautiful and rarely sung Christmas tune.

2. December, by George Winston. I've heard some people call this the single best-selling "new age" album of all time. Could be. It's only available in a new, 20th anniversary special release now. My version is an old cassette tape, printed in Korean: I got it from a fellow missionary (who had received it from a Korean friend) fifteen years ago, while I was serving in South Korea. Why that other missionary didn't appreciate Winston's piano solos I'll never know. Beautifully spare and elegant at times; shinning with sound at others. My favorite is his classy, restrained treatment of another humble and rarely sung folk carol, "Jesus, Jesus, Rest Your Head."

3. Handel's Messiah: A Soulful Celebration. This cd was an instant hit among just about everyone I knew when it came out in 1992. And what's not to love? While very much a late-1980s pop/gospel production, the producers saw fit to bring in artists of nearly every stripe to tackle portions of Handel's masterwork. Thus we have Al Jarreau cooking with a big band on "Why Do the Nations so Furiously Rage?," Stevie Wonder and Take 6 sliding luxuriously through a honey-smooth "O Thou the Tellest Good Tidings to Zion," and my favorite, Patti Austin's powerful and righteous vocal work on a funky "But Who May Abide the Day of His Coming?" Worth the price of the cd alone.

4. The Bells of Dublin, by The Chieftans. More than a fine collection of carols and seasonal Irish folk music, this recording--which begins and ends with the chimes of the twelve bells of Christchurch Cathedral in Dublin, recorded live--aurally transports you into a distinct and delightful Christmas world, filled with piety and gaiety, good drink and good food, and few arguments as well (see Elvis Costello's contribution, "St. Stephen's Day Murders"). Jackson Browne melds well with the Chieftans in "The Rebel Jesus," his secular contribution to the season; the high point, however, is the Renaissance Singers gorgeous choral performance, accompanied on the organ of St. Anne's Cathedral in Belfast, of "Once in Royal David's City," possibly my favorite religious carol of them all.

5. Christmas, by Rockapella. Not everyone is a fan of a cappella music, I know, especially when it comes to Christmas songs. What makes this collection of vocal arrangements stand out? Well, I'm not sure. I mean, Rockapella is good, but are they that good? Maybe not. But they're fine pop-jazz vocalists, every last one of them. And this cd does have, hands down, the best, funniest, most rocking cover of "You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch" I've ever heard, so at least it has that going for it.

6. A Christmas Together, John Denver and the Muppets. A sentimental favorite? Yes, but that doesn't mean you can't make a good case for its music. Somehow, Denver's aw-shucks-folks demeanor melded about as well with Jim Henson's and Frank Oz's lovable Muppet-mania as any performer who ever showed up on their show; no wonder he was their first and only choice for a Christmas album. The result is magic: the treacle in Denver's "Alfie: The Christmas Tree" and "It's in Everyone of Us" is so thick you could cut it with a knife, but it still goes down sweetly. And I insist that Denver's duet with Rowlf the Dog, in his piano man mode, on "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" is just about the definitive rendition of the song: reflective, spare, and melancholy, but whimsically upbeat all the same. A must-have.

7. A Charlie Brown Christmas, by the Vince Guaraldi Trio. I've looked and listened, but still, I've yet to come across a Christmas jazz record which touches this one. Every piece on here, from "O Tannenbaum" to "Greensleeves" is a gem. As the reviewers say, buy it for the nostalgia, but keep it because it is, holiday aside, very nearly a masterpiece.

8. A Very Special Christmas. There have been so many sequels to this great collection, and many of them have some pretty good stuff on them, but the original is still, I think, the best of the bunch. It's dated, but so what? The Sting on this album (giving us a dark, brooding cover of the rarely sung carol, Gabriel's Message) is the moody, oh-so-burdened, long-haired Sting of the late 1980s; on the other hand, Run-DMC's pitch-perfect "Christmas Rap" joyously and raucously serves up the whole hip-hop banquet, long before the genre became a parody of itself. The most original arrangement has got to be the spooky, synthesized, cool (literarlly) pop treatment which the Eurythmics give "Winter Wonderland." A confession though: I love this recording partly because my copy of it is an old tape, copied from another tape, with various other recorded-off-the-radio bits on it--and the highlight of all that errata is a recording of Bruce Springsteen's cover of "Santa Claus is Coming to Town," which is, I believe, only available on a hard-to-find single Springsteen released in 1985. In case you've never heard it, I assure you: it rocks.

9. Christmas, by Mannheim Steamroller. There is something to be said for all of Mannheim Steamroller's Christmas albums; everyone has their own favorite. Their third Christmas recording, Christmas in the Aire, includes a haunting, slow, distorted bass-heavy arrangement of "Jingle Bells," as well as a whimsical take on "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" via electronically souped-up toy instruments. Melissa's dad adores their second album, Fresh Aire Christmas, because of its touching choral arrangement of his favorite carol, "Still Still Still." But I prefer their first effort, because of the simple perfection of their take on "Silent Night." It's always the last thing I listen to before I blow out the candles on Christmas Eve.

10. A bunch of random stuff. We have The Osmonds Family Christmas--what Mormon family doesn't? Our copy is (again!) a tape that's been handed down for years. I won't tell you to go out and buy it, but Jimmy's song "It Never Snows in L.A." is really kind of cute. Of course, we have one of the innumerable Elvis Presley Christmas collections--we live in the South, after all. Forget the knock-offs; his "Blue Christmas" really is solid gold. We haven't given Harry Connick Jr.'s new Christmas cd a listen yet, but his When My Heart Finds Christmas has some good songs on it--his big band stuff doesn't swing as well as he imagines it does, but his more intimate, bluesy jazz numbers, like the gospel-tinged "I Pray on Christmas," are wonderful. And while I'm put off at how she frequently drops the more Christ-focused lyrics (such as the middle passages of the wonderful carol, "In the Bleak Midwinter") from her recordings, I do very much like Shawn Colvin's Holiday Songs and Lullabies, if only because of her sweet, light renditions of "Love Came Down at Christmas" and "Little Road to Bethlehem." Charming.

There. That'll get you started.

2003-11-30T21:33:00.000-06:00

Update

Scott MacMillan, who is guest blogging over at Fistful of Euros, has written a very fine post on the recent decision by France and Germany to ignore some of the strictures of the EU's "stability pact" which was instituted to help insure the success of the Euro. His analysis of the situation brought up questions about the possibility of democratic (not to mention fiscal!) accountability in "postnational" or "non-national" state arrangements, which is what the EU--in the eyes of some, at least--aspires to be. Given my recent post about Europe and nationality, I could resist jumping into the discussion, and Scott and I go back and forth in the comments section a few times. Scott also links in the comments to an old post of his on the proposed EU constitution (scroll down to June 25), which is brings up some interesting issues as well. I'll probably write more on this topic sooner or later, but for now Fistful seems to be where I'm doing my Europe-related thinking.

2003-11-26T10:11:00.000-06:00

He Forgets Not His Own

We Gather Together (Prayer of Thanksgiving)

We gather together to ask the Lord's blessing;
He chastens and hastens His will to make known;
The wicked oppressing now cease from distressing.
Sing praises to His name; He forgets not His own.

Beside us to guide us, our God with us joining,
Ordaining, maintaining His kingdom divine;
So from the beginning the fight we are winning;
Thou, Lord, wast at our side; all glory be Thine!

We all do extol Thee, Thou Leader triumphant,
And pray that Thou still our Defender wilt be.
Let they congregation escape tribulation;
Thy name be ever praised! O Lord, make us free!

(Text anonymous, 17th-century Dutch; trans. by Theodore Baker, 1851-1934)

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! May your day be filled with friends and family, gratitude, good food, and good cheer.

2003-11-24T17:38:00.000-06:00

Nationality and European Identity

For a few months now, I've been wanting to write an essay on the future of Europe as a "nation"--whether it has such a future, whether anyone (European or otherwise) actually desires such a future, what kind of relationship such a future may or may not have to the current European Union or the proposed European constitution, and so forth. Maybe the reason I haven't written it yet is because my thoughts on the subject are too broad; they touch on too many matters pertaining to political theory, history, and world politics to cast much light on any of them in particular. The closest I've come to finding a hook to hang my reflections on is, first, Juergen Habermas's provocative and perplexing call last summer for the formation of common European identity (recently published in the journal Constellations; the only English translation I'm aware of on the internet--and it isn't the official one--is here), and second, the ongoing and fascinating debate over whether or not proposed European constitution should include some reference to God. What do these two have to do with each other, or with the future (or lack thereof) of national or supranational or postnational identity in Europe? Quite a bit actually, considering that Habermas includes "secularism" in his list of the fundamental building blocks of European society. But even to wrestle with all that is to cast my net too widely, so let me try to narrow things further, to the specific cause of this post: a wonderful, touching post by Tobias Schwarz from the group blog A Fistful of Euros. Tobias, quoting Goethe's powerful lines on the necessarily priority of feeling to any understanding, tries to articulate what it is to "feel European" today. He writes about

"an email conversation I had with an American friend in early 2002. Much like many of his countrymen and especially his colleagues within the Washington Beltway, he never really understood what happened in Western Europe after 1945....Maybe the idea of a nascent European identity based on cherishing diversity--not a common outsider--is impossible to explain--'Unless you feel, naught will you ever gain.' Those who do feel will recognize it, even when it [is] disguise[d] as a 3-hour-long poetry reading in fifteen different languages that even the publicly subsidized elite tv-station 3sat decided to hide entirely from the public by broadcasting it from 1-4 on a Friday night....Yes, sometimes this [identity] means hard work. Sometimes it means listening to poetry in languages no one in the audience will understand. But sometimes, it just comes naturally."

The trouble with Tobias's American friend, according to Tobias, is that he is "still intellectually locked up in the rationality myth of zero-sum strategic competition": that is, the territorial/cultural boundary-struggles of sovereign states. To cherish diversity in contemporary Europe, on the other hand, is in Tobias's view to liberated from such competition; that was the lesson of WWII. That's a powerful lesson, to be sure, and very possibly one very much worth learning. However, I wonder to what extent whether what follows such a lesson really is an "identity" at all. You don't have to be some kind of Robert Kagan-Samuel Huntington-type realist to acknowledge that the whole original point of identity, long before it become an opportunity for subjective expression and recognition, was political: that is, it was about locating where was (and who was, and what was) the polis. Where is this city, and where is that one, and which one am I in now? In that sense, European identity can't help but be, along with all the other important cultural markers (poetry, film, travel, education, etc.) which Tobias notes, also a matter of identifying a European location, a collective European space, a linguistically and/or historically and/or culturally connected commonality. This is a point made pretty strongly, I think, by Habermas in not only his rallying cry for European unity, but also in other essays he has written about Europe over the last several years.

But there is a problem with this space--it is not clear how it is to be constructed, or even if any actual European wants to do the constructing. For that will mean taking the raw materials one has on hand, as it were, and making building out of them some new institutional form for Europe. Habermas and others have tended to see the EU as the near-perfect embodiment of this construction, for all the best reasons: it is (supposedly) a post-national organization, evolving in accordance with broad universals rather than particular interests, removed from history and thus old allegiances. And yet, in the comments to Tobias's post, Scott Martens calls this organization (though perhaps he was quoting someone else) a "monstrosity"--a sentiment widely shared, if polls are to be trusted, by many Europeans (particularly those outside of the French-Benelux-German core). If the EU (and the whole matter of "constitutions, foreign policy, norms, [and] bureaucrats," as Scott puts it) really does have nothing to do with "feeling European"--if being European is not only "postnational," but even "postpolitical," or at least aspires to be--then the identity which Tobias touchingly invokes seems to me one of three possible things. Either it is 1) something utterly new in the whole history of identity; 2) bound to fail, or at least never develop beyond the sort of sentimental fraternity which dormmates always feel when they spend an enjoyable afternoon watching a football game together; 3) merely a way-station on the route towards a truly cosmopolitan world-state. Habermas is, I think, willing to acknowledge the third option; that what he calls "the European nation-state" is really what he (like all good Kantians) rationally believes ought eventually to be the proper postnational form of sovereignty for humanity as a whole. Certainly not a bad goal, but not exactly the same as building a common consciousness out of Europe's historical diversity either.

What do I think of all this? I think 1) is unlikely: perhaps, between modern technology and contemporary secularism, the very ontology of identity really has been changed in the West, and "cherishing diversity" need not any longer involve any kind of political perception of the world whatsoever--but given that traditional nationalist conceptions continue to break out throughout even Habermas's contemporary Europe, I doubt it. I find 3) philosophically defensible, though I suspect it is neither practicable nor wise. That leaves 2). So I'm a Euroskeptic, then? To a degree--but I'm not sure that simply dismissing Tobias's very real experiences as a contemporary European is possible either. The only remaining alternative is to bring politics back into it, and suggest that, whether or not anyone cares to admit it, what is going on in Europe via the EU is "nation-building." (Actually, Charles Taylor has at least recognized this and named it properly; as he very simply put it, sovereign regimes require a political identity if they are to have democratic legitimacy, and hence the future of Europe "depends on [what kind of] shared European identity can be forged out of the 25 nations that will soon make up the European Union.") At first glance, any talk about a truly "European nation" or a "European nationality"--with a more or less united culture, an embedded way of life, a common European sittlichkeit to use Hegel's terms--presumably runs counter to most everything Habermas has wanted to accomplish. He has, after all, described his goal as creating a kind of republicanism--or more generally, a system of citizenship--that can "stand on it's own feet"; i.e., without the supporting boundaries of communal or cultural identity. Habermas is justly famous for denigrating actually existing politics--i.e., with nationalist or volkisch overtones--in favor of a cosmopolitan Verfassungspatriotismus (constitutional patriotism). In other words, he seems to have little interest in the "love of one's own," but only concern for abstract Kantian, republican principles.

All true--and I've been more than clear on the political character (and necessity) of acknowledging the love one has (or should have) for one's own. But to leave the criticism at that point misses what conceptually seems to be work in all these various types of state and/or civic nationalisms or patriotisms. For instance, what happens when, on the ground, in people's actually lived lives, a certain "political-ethical will" (as Habermas puts it) regarding, say, some "cosmopolitan" law, truly replaces an understanding and devotion to local laws? It's not like this can never happen: between the memory of the struggles of the Revolutionary War, the fear of a repeat of Shay's Rebellion, the arguments of the Federalists, dozens of other factors, the American will as of 1787 came to be constructed around a "federal" (national) state, rather than around thirteen separate, historically distinct sovereignties. (Obviously the process was much more complicated and extended than that, but that such a transferal of attachment took place is indisputable.) Trudeau's effort to reconstruct Canadian attachments through a repatriated constitution and official bilingualism was similar--far from an overwhelming success, to be sure, but nonetheless, his (and other's) acts of political/civic "will" changed Canada (for better or worse) into something which was hardly there 30 years ago.

It's been commonplace in the literature on nationalism and national attachments lately to criticize theorists like Will Kymlicka and others by claiming, contrary to their position, that one cannot willfully "choose," for personal or political (presumably liberal) reasons, to embrace or construct a particular civic nationalism (which is essentially what Habermas is talking about here, whether he would admit it or not): there will always be a cultural/ethnic element to identity as well. I fully agree with that criticism. But as I've also come to believe that this must run both ways: there also can be no cultural/ethnic identity which doesn't get "negotiated" in a political/civic arena. (Bernard Yack has made this point in several important articles.) Does this mean that Habermas's preferred Kantian principles could potentially become, through the civic development of an economically connected Europe, a new kind of sittlichkeit--could they become "ethnic," "embedded" in a new kind of distinctly European life? Personally, I still have my doubts--primarily because (and here my commitment to Johann Gottfried Herder is most apparent), whatever else one might patriotically will, it seems to me that the specificity of language will remain an enormous obstacle and constraint on the human political imagination. (The thirteen colonies all spoke English, after all. And the Canadian example can be read both positively and negatively...) And yet...I don't think we've ever seen anything like Europe today before in the history of the world. As I mentioned above, the levels of technology, the levels of secularity, the ease of association (even the levels of language-sharing), are, arguably, completely unprecedented. And so Tobias's talk fascinates me--there's something happening in Europe today, something clearly "national" (and those who hold to an anti-political vision of Europe will, I fear, only misunderstand and possibly warp that process), but something which goes beyond it as well. I'm not saying I think Habermas is right; all I'm saying is that I think it's useful to look where he's looking. History isn't finished with the nation yet, not by a long shot.

2003-11-21T17:08:00.000-06:00

Service to One's Own

I really have meant to write more than I have lately for a couple of weeks running now, but I just keep running out of time. And now here it is Friday afternoon and once again, I'm thinking I should put off blogging until next week. However, I've just discovered over at Winds of Change a very nice essay I missed from last Veteran's Day: Rob Lyman's reflections on "The Moral Duty of 'Tribal Patriotism.'" He succinctly touches on the collective responsibility to care for "one's own" that must, or at least ought to, characterize every sovereign democratic community: "[e]ach nation-state, or at least each democracy, is a tribe: we must hang together, or we will surely hang separately....I say that the citizens of each country have an obligation to protect each other which supersedes any obligations they may owe to those outside of their country." I'm not sure how far I would want to defend Rob's language: there are, after all, ways to talk about international commitments--and even the emergence of an "international community"--that do not necessarily undermine the national/tribal basis of human solidarity and trust (consider the challenging words of Tony Blair, for example). But in general, I can't disagree with anything he said.

Not unexpectedly thought, many other people did disagree with what he said. An enormous number of comments followed his essay; some were intelligent critiques, but just as many weren't. The next day, Armed Liberal posted a smart response of sorts to some of those who commented on Rob's essay; in it, he indicted the perspective of his critics as exemplifying "one of the defects I see in liberalism today; the notion that one can, personally, have clean hands despite the acts of one's [own] people. You get to that position, I think, because you have a fundamentally cosmopolitan viewpoint - you are an individual whose connections are equally [strong] to all other individuals...[meaning your] connection to the nation is therefore arbitrary and, most of all, chosen rather than accepted." I like how A.L. brought up cosmopolitanism there; it's a comforting illusion, and an old one, which can't ever be put down enough. Johann Gottfried Herder, who I've written about plenty, put it best over 200 years ago when he described the "saturated heart of the idle cosmopolitan," which "offers shelter to nobody."

More specifically, regarding "clean hands" and the very idea of collective or national or "tribal" responsibility, there was--again, not at all unexpectedly--a libertarian rejoinder to Rob's argument from Julian Sanchez. Julian's claims essentially amounted to presenting the (apparently to him) scandalous notion of democratic citizenship as substantively and logically equivalent to the sort of theological hive-mind mentality which presumably exists among Osama bin Laden's soldiers. A.L. once again very ably rushed to Rob's defense, pointing out that the well-understood logical claim that "we take on obligations by living in a society; some of the obligations are not of our choosing or making, but we bear them nonetheless" is hardly comparable to some kind of cultish anti-individualism. Of course, Julian's viewpoint is basically just the usual libertarian conviction that our choices are, and must be, all or nothing; either total liberty or soul-crushing totality. That there might be social groups, civic spheres, tribal allegiances, national ties, and collective entities that are neither necessarily subservient to absolute individual choice nor always opposed to it--indeed, that there might actually be communities that can, through our solidarity and service to them, actually enrich our individuality--never occurs to them. As A.L. puts it, it's "ahistorical, atomistic individuality," through and through.

The Winds of Change guys can handle their own fights, of course, but Julian's condescending dismissal of Rob's intelligent comments in favor of national duty and obligation put me in mind of some old posts of mine, written originally in response to some comments made by Jacob T. Levy, a libertarian who recognizes (unlike Julian, at least in this case) the complications of his position. The topic was the various national service proposals which some politicians like to float around (but rarely back up with full-funding: see Bush administration, AmeriCorps). But the argument quickly went beyond that, towards the whole idea that belonging just might entail service, and that a legitimate sovereign community can and should both expect and cultivate such service. I won't repost those old posts, but I will quote from them (the originals are here and here). First, a general comment...

"In many ways the libertarian position is an exceptionally powerful one, but I've never been able to grasp it's problem with social duty. Basically, I fail to understand why on earth these questions should always be framed as a choice between "belonging" to oneself alone, or "belonging" to the government. Don't you also belong to a neighborhood, a community, a society, or at least a segment of it? If so, why is it so appalling to suggest that, just as the individual is constituted in part by the social continuity she emerges from, so does the individual have obligations and duties to that social context which is her own?...Of course, the response is usually that such communitarian language is all fluff, because in the end, it still is the state which does the asking, right? Two rejoinders: first, such a response assumes that there cannot possibly be a national community on whose behalf the state speaks. There is, of course, a large body of communitarian argument which insists exactly that point; the nation, these thinkers claim, can never be the proper recipient of authentic social, collective obligation, because the nation is too large/too diverse/too historically compromised to ever actually aspire to being a "community." But these arguments are not being fundamentally engaged by libertarian talk about the individual vs. the state, since they would probably expect their response to apply even if mandated service arose from a social entity which "authentically" could claim "community" status...Second, [regarding the implication] that nothing socially beneficial can come from the state's asking....there is much evidence that state involvement is an essential part of civil-society-building-voluntarism."

And second, following up on that last point, in response to the legitimate libertarian complaint that sovereign duties will always undermine the associational spirit that communitarians like myself supposedly desire...

"[Of course] no public-spiritedness campaign, no national service program, could ever or would ever replace the associational spiritedness which arises because of the norms and mores which the American people have (thus far) internalized. And if it could be shown that such national projects diminish associational spiritedness, I would be absolutely in the wrong if I continued to defend them. However, I think the very best you can say is that the evidence is mixed....I think there is also good reason to believe that associational spiritedness in the United States was stronger when there was an involving and reciprocating state playing its part in backing up the authority or voice of said associations, whether national or otherwise (the draft is the best example, but not the only one). In other words, mandatory "public-spiritedness" might actually contribute to and enrich subsequent volunteering in society."

Not that I expect anyone's mind to be changed by all that. Still, when you run up against the blogosphere in all its libertarian glory, you gotta do what you gotta do.

2003-11-11T11:59:00.000-06:00

Update

Josh Cherniss has taken notice, via the entry below, of Timothy Burke's wonderfully reflective essay on what taking his child to some local museums taught him about class and the public sphere. This reminds me that I meant to update that post with some comments from a friend of mine, who lives in Fairfield County, CT: another location where, as in Philadelphia, the urban (mostly minority) poor and the professional (mostly white) upper-class live in practically the same civic space. Emphasis on the "practically." But let me allow my friend to explain himself:

"Here in the burbs we have a fairly interesting YMCA system. By accident or design, the Y has three physical locations: A sprawling complex in a predominantly white affluent suburb, a "conference center" on a 200-acre lot in prime wilderness terrain, and an urban recreation center in a poor, predominantly Hispanic downtown area. Upper-middle suburbanites join the Y for facilities that resemble those of a country club - in fact, old, towel clad men actually close business deals in the mint-infused steamroom - but these goodies only come with a deluxe membership. Patrons can also purchase a standard membership, but they don't get all the perks (bring your own towels, no steam room, etc). Likewise, people in my community pay market rates to send their kids to Y camps -- either the expensive camp at the nature center (akin to the private museum [which Burke talked about]) or to the traditional day camp (akin in terms of crowds to the public museum). Here's the kicker, though. Regardless of whether you choose the deluxe or the standard membership/camp, a large part of the money is earmarked to support the operation of the urban Y, most of whose patrons receive memberships gratis. The organization also provides a large number of scholarships to both the nature center and standard summer camps, depending on the need of the camper. Most people feel quite good about this arrangement.

"I recognize that this system works largely by the accident of geography; the urban poor lack the resources to travel to a distant suburban location, even though their membership technically allows them access to the facility. This means that the suburbanites can enjoy the homogeneous, quiet civility that gives this particular Y its country club-esque flavor and can still claim equal access to all levels of society. Nevertheless, I think that the system also points to a potential for community participants to take responsibility for those in their midst who are unable to do for themselves. Socialism in capitalist clothes, but [an arrangement] less onerous for the suburbanites and less degrading and dehumanizing for the urbanites....It simply requires a community willing to transfer its excess from the wealthy to the poor without organizational compulsion."

I think it's very honest of my friend to recognize that this arrangement has the support of the broader public (both in terms of tax money as well as continued attendance at public facilities) at least partly, if not primarily, because of an "accident of geography" which allows members of the middle and upper classes to enjoy the benefits of--as Burke described it--"a private retreat from the public sphere, where you can have as much of a share of the privately bounded always-for-sale commons as you have time and money to claim," without in fact actually making such a retreat, thus sparing the affluent white suburbanites of Fairfield County the guilt and resentment involved in having to "accept such losses [of one's ability to create a relatively genteel social-educational environment through public works] and rationaliz[e] them as justified in terms of the loser's own culturally bounded shortcomings and hang-ups." The result: everyone's happy in their (dare we say publicly segregated?) arrangements. As I see it, Burke's whole point was that, as long as the world of the marketplace (and, and must add even if Burke didn't, the decline of communal norms, the breakdown of parental authority, the absence of civic shame...) makes the "tragedy of the commons" a fact of life, those who can avoid the commons will do so, meaning the commons will ultimately decline. (In short, the free-rider vs. full-contributor problem.) If, however, a twist of geography can keep the commons "discrete," as it were, then the middle and upper classes will continue to give their support to public projects, without having to wrestle with whether or not they can stand to be tagged as one of those (dare we say conservative?) white-flight Bobos or Patio Men which David Brooks has so often taught us about.

Talking about Brooks reminds me of my old hang-ups, about class and location and occupation. My deepest internal struggle--at least insofar as politics goes--is figuring out how I should feel, and how I should belong, when my class and my location do not mesh, when the suburban retreat is not an option. But I shouldn't allow my personal crusades to interfere with acknowledging that, whatever sort of compromises Fairfield County's solution to Burke's (and my) problems rest upon, it is nonetheless a solution, and one that should not be dismissed. Should we purposefully set out to make socio-economic segregation a guiding principle in our construction and funding of in civic spaces? That's putting it too harshly, and too unfairly. But look around at your towns: look at where the parks are built, what reasons they are built for, and who uses them. It's not as if this sort of (usually unstated) reasoning is absent from where we put museums, how we pay for swimming pools, and who maintains the playgrounds. Is this the sort of thing better left unstated? Or would we better serve the commons overall by bringing this particular hypocrisy out into the light?

2003-11-05T10:02:00.000-06:00

One is the Loneliest Number

This ball started rolling last week, but I never got around to blogging anything about it. Remember the "Political Compass" quiz? Well, starting last week everyone began taking it and sharing their results: Matthew Ygelsias, Daniel Drezner, Brian Leiter, and many, many others, all of whom Lawrence Solum kept track of. Now, I've expressed my discontent with the Political Compass before, not necessarily because it is flawed (though it obviously is that), but because taking the test simply reveals the strong preference for libertarian or quasi-libertarian positions in our culture--or, at least, the ease with which the presumed moral logic of libertarianism is seen to encompass what are clearly the political sympathies of the majority of Americans and other westerners. Those who take the test, whether on the "left" or the "right," more often than not find themselves occupying the bottom half of the quiz's schematic, where "liberty" is made an opposite of "authority." And who wants to be an authoritarian? Anyway, that's what I've always felt; when John Holbo took the test, I made a comment along those lines; I did the same when Chris Bertram took the test, and I left it at that.

But now behold! Sometime in the last couple of days, Tim Lambert has plotted all of those who have reported their scores on the Political Compass quiz on a single graph. And what does the result show, in all its schematic glory? That I was right: as The Plainsman puts it in his analysis (scroll down a little bit), what we have are plenty of "vanilla liberals," lots of "right libertarians" and "vanilla conservatives," a few "centrists" and "leftists," a couple of serious "right-wingers," and only "a small dotting of populists/paleoconservatives/theocons," with next to nobody occupying the upper-left hand quadrant. Actually, The Plainsman thought he was the only one there, but has since corrected himself, which is right...because I'm out there too. In fact, I'm way out there; I'm the single most isolated blogger on that graph, with no one within two data points of me in any direction. So much for believing in both social justice and civic morality! (I wonder where communitarian godfather Amitai Etzioni would land on this graph?) While I certainly wouldn't call myself either a paleocon or a theocon, the fact that such conservatives are willing to acknowledge the necessity of--as I put it in a thread on conservatism on John Holbo's site a while back--"follow[ing] through on their cultural beliefs to a demand for stability and equity in the fabric of the economic order" leads me to have a certain amount of sympathy for them. In an earlier post (again, scroll down), The Plainsman describes himself as a "moderate communitarian conservative," a man with a "slight tilt toward economic interventionism and social cohesion." He is absolutely right to insist that such a position is anything but "authoritarian." Unfortunately, I'm not sure how much difference his and my arguments will make. The Plainsman and I might not actually agree with each other that much on particular political matters (class-based politics? religious establishment? environmentalism? the war in Iraq?), but one thing is certain: if quizzes like these, with all their faults, fairly accurately reflect or reveal the overwhelming liberal individualist ethos which shapes the modern world--and I'm afraid that they do--then communitarians like he and I are going to have a pretty lonely time of it, for perhaps a pretty long time.

2003-10-28T11:55:00.000-06:00

The Middle Class and the Public Sphere

I can't recommend too strongly this wonderful post by Timothy Burke. He takes his daughter to a museum in Philadelphia, finds it swamped by rude, unsupervised, mostly minority kids, struggles with guilt and resentment, and leaves. Then he takes his daughter to another, more "elite" museum, and finds a different sort of problem. From this, Timothy works out, simply put, one of the finest reflections on the often deeply confusing way in which socio-economic realities have infected and affected the way we (academics, intellectuals, everyone) think about the common good that I've read in a very long time. A beautiful post. I've struggled in my own way to address some of the social complications inherent to these themes (in my own context--namely, being a philosopher in poor, rural Arkansas), but the way Timothy framed things makes for superb reading. Of course, the fact that I miss living in the Mid-Atlantic and taking my kids to those same museums maybe just makes it more poignant for me. Anyway, hats off to Tim--and read the whole thing.

2003-10-24T08:45:00.000-05:00

Amazon.com and the Future of Research!

Jacob T. Levy is excited about the new "search inside the book" at Amazon.com, and he is right to be. I've been getting e-mail about it from friends and students. Jacob writes that "looking at this feature I [had] the strongest sense I've had in ages that it was something revolutionary and marked a profound change in how I would read." He also links to Alec Nevala-Lee, who writes that: "between this monstrous djinn and Google.com, I have no excuse, no excuse whatsoever, for not writing a grand synthetic essay of everything, or a brilliant, glittering, Pynchonesque novel...because millions and millions of beautiful connections between people and ideas are already out there, at my fingertips, ready to be made without effort or erudition. I hate to say this, but it's all up to me now."

Information really is getting ever more accessible, and ever more thoroughly so. How will this change research in the long run? Where are we heading? Reading Alec's comments, something popped into my head: an old science fiction story, by someone I hadn't read in ages. Running to my bookshelf I found it, and realized: this has all been foreseen....

Leyel Forska sat before his lector display, reading through an array of recently published scholarly papers. A holograph of two pages of text hovered in the air before him....When he came to the end he did not press the PAGE key to continue the article. Instead he pressed NEXT.
The two pages he had been reading slid backward about a centimeter, joining a dozen previously discarded articles, all standing in the air over the lector. With a soft beep, a new pair of pages appeared in front of the old ones.
Deet spoke up from where she sat eating breakfast. "You're only giving the poor soul two pages before you consign him to the wastebin?"
"I'm consigning him to oblivion," Leyel answered cheerfully. "No, I'm consigning him to hell."
"What? Have you rediscovered religion in your old age?"
"I'm creating one. It has no heaven, but it has a terrible everlasting hell for young scholars who think they can make their reputation by attacking my work."
"Ah, you have a theology," said Deet. "Your work is holy write, and to attack it is blasphemy."
"I welcome intelligent attacks. But this young tube-headed professor from--yes, of course, Minus University--"
"Old Minus U?"
"He thinks he can refute me, destroy me, lay me in the dust, and all he has bothered to cite are studies published within the last thousand years."
"The principle of millennial depth is still widely used--"
"The principle of millennial depth is the confession of modern scholars that they are not willing to spend as much effort on research as they do on academic politics. I shattered the principle of millennial depth thirty years ago. I proved that it was--"
"Stupid and outmoded. But my dearest darling sweetheart Leyel, you did it by spending part of the immeasurably vast Forska fortune to search for inaccessible and forgotten archives in every section of the Empire."
"Neglected and decaying. I had to reconstruct half of them."
"It would take a thousand universities' library budgets to match what you spent on research for 'Human Origin on the Null Planet.'"
"But once I spent the money, all those archives were open. They have been open for three decades. The serious scholars all use them, since millennial depth yields nothing but predigested, pre-excreted muck. They search among the turds of rats who have devoured elephants, hoping to find ivory."
"So colorful an image. My breakfast tastes much better now," Deet said. ("The Originist," Maps in a Mirror: The Short Fiction of Orson Scott Card, pgs. 214-215)

The parallel? Well, just as the capitalist Leyel Forska opened up the archives for his own purposes, so has Amazon.com done so for its own reasons. And now--well, there's the world of information, for better or worse, at your fingertips. Search away! And if you are--like Jacob and I--a scholar who depends upon research, then you had especially better get searching. A few more new electronic toys like this, and we may all find ourselves getting hammered by those more aggressive searchers, who realize that 10, or 100, or even 1000 years of simple title and keyword searches just won't ever be enough.

2003-10-23T12:24:00.000-05:00

Some (Long) Thoughts on Class and the Democratic Party

Peter Beinart's typically insightful take on recent moves by Howard Dean in pursuit of the Democratic nomination, and the way Dick Gephardt, of all people, is slowly emerging (to the DLC's great surprise) as a genuine alternative to Dean in the continuing struggle for the Democratic party's demographic soul, should be required reading. It smartly puts together the recent history of such intra-party fights (Hart vs. Mondale, Tsongas vs. Clinton, Bradley vs. Gore), rightly puts the cultural as well as the economic dynamics of this struggle into the mix, and comes out with an insightful, succinct conclusion: "Dean, who learned fiscal conservatism from his investment-banker, Republican father, embodies today's Democratic Party better than Gephardt, the son of a Teamster from working-class St. Louis. Perhaps nothing explains the fight for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination better than that." I'm not going to be nearly as succinct as Beinart, but I'm going to cover some of the same territory, because the more important story behind this particular struggle is, to me, the question of class--or more specifically, what is going to happen to it, and therefore to political concern for the economically and culturally marginalized, when and if the Democratic party completes its current transition.

In 1969, Kevin Phillips wrote a book called The Emerging Republican Majority. In it, he argued that the Democratic party of the 1960s, by pursuing a national collectivist approach to fulfilling its traditional (since FDR at least) mandate for economic, racial, gender and education equality, as well as by tolerating the antiwar counterculture, was successfully alienating not only long-time white southern Democrats (something which Lyndon Johnson had predicted would happen immediately after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act), but also long-time white working-class Democrats in the northern cities. Put this alienation together with demographic shifts to the suburbs and to the West, Phillips wrote, and you have a winning strategy for Republicans. The Republicans took it, and it worked. Through the 1970s, you saw white flight from the cities across the country, the "Sagebrush" and anti-tax rebellions in the western states, the rise of a popular California politician and the emergence of "Reagan Democrats," and an explicit Republican effort to cultivate the "Solid (conservative, evangelical, white) South." The result was a more or less general shift rightward in our national politics, serious tax cutting and reform, 12 years of a Republican White House, and a slow but indisputable change in (or at least the rise of a serious challenge to) the dominant ideology of our judicial system.

Of course, Phillips's book didn't tell the whole story--there was a Cold War going on at the time too--but he told enough of it that his strategy was taken to be true story of American national politics, from the early 70s to the early 90s. And thus, Phillips's story also provided the key component of the bitter liberal backlash during the 1980s: race. Sure, that wasn't the only theme (there were also the "Republicans hate women" and the "Republicans hate the poor" mantras), but race dominated or at least colored all domestic politics for more than a generation. The Republicans were "playing the race card," they were winning because of bigoted rednecks in the south, paranoid surbanites in the north and midwest, and wetback-fearing racists in the southwest. Conservative white Americans can't handle affirmative action, can't handle busing, can't handle integrated neighborhoods, can't handle immigration, can't handle racial justice, can't handle progress, and Republicans were providing them with a political home. True or not (and there's a fair amount of truth to the charge), this was national politics in the United States, until Bill Clinton and the 1990s began to rewrite the rules.

Now we have a new book, The Emerging Democratic Majority, by John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira. Their argument is that, just as seeds of the Republican majority were planted in the mid-1960s and came to fruition by the late 1970s, so has a new Democratic majority--a post-New Deal, post-Great Society, "progressive centrist" Democratic majority--been slowly hatching ever since the mid-1990s, and demographic and policy trends make its eventual emergence basically inevitable. Their thesis rests on three pillars:

1) Women. With every election cycle, not only do more women relative to men turn out to vote, but also single working women increasingly tend to dominate that female vote, and Republicans continue to fail to win anything like a majority it. By being so strenuously opposed (in rhetoric, if not in practice) to abortion rights and the expansion of day care and other "family friendly" laws, Republicans have put themselves in a gender hole that they won't be able to climb out of for decades to come.

2) Minorities. Of course, African-Americans have been largely voting Democratic since the 1960s--they remember who it was who fought to get them registered. But Judis and Teixeira also maintain that Hispanics and Asians are also, with the end of the Cold War increasingly Democratic. But this second pillar isn't nearly as important as the third...

3) "Professionals." This isn't exactly the best term for what they mean to describe; what they're getting at is "idea workers" in, I think, Robert Reich's phrase, or what Nicholas Lemann called "Mandarins." They are lawyers, actors and other media folk, doctors, computer jockeys, academics and teachers, insurance agents and money managers, internet gurus, architects, engineers and scientists, nurses, social workers, therapists and counselors and inspirational speakers, fashion designers, interior decorators, artists, editors and free-lance writers. These people--as opposed to their corporate and bureaucratic managers and employers--are all voting Democratic. Why? First, because they aren't as profit-minded as their bosses; they do what they do, according to Judis and Teixeira, because of they love ideas, providing a service, etc. And second, related to the first, because their vision of ideas and service is open-ended: tolerant and experimental and sympathetic. They are "liberation-minded," and are fundamentally at peace--indeed, are the greatest coverts to--the ethos of liberation which found a home in American universities in the 1950s and 1960s. Unsurprisingly, they--more often than not--live in or near urban areas (not the old blue-color industrial cities, but progressive, happening, "Ideopolises"), are into "soft technology" (i.e., private gizmos) and don't go to church; they are socially liberal and fiscally moderate; they don't really like unions or big government but they dislike heartless corporations and moral busy-bodies most of all. As Judis and Teixeira put it, "the Bush administration can scour the coal pits of West Virginia or the boarded up steel mills of Youngstown for converts, but America's future lies in places like Silicon Valley and North Carolina's Research Triangle."

This seems pretty plausible, especially in light of the "continental divide" which Beinart (and many others) have described. Hispanic and Asian immigration, and the long-awaited emergence of a real, solid African-American middle class, have diluted and transformed the old intensity of the black-white divide; while racial politics remain very visible in many regions of the country and many facets of our society, I think one of the real consequences of the Clinton administration--a man who completely sewed up the black vote while simultaneously giving Jesse Jackson the cold shoulder--is that the "race card," to whatever extent it ever existed, has been altered. Welfare reform has made it possible to talk about "the underclass" without tip-toeing through a racially charged minefield. At the same time, the "feminization"--or "domestication"--of American politics has continued to soldier on; maybe 9/11 has returned us permanently to foreign-policy orientation, maybe it hasn't, but either way, you can't deny the fact that when today's politicians aren't talking about Iraq or al-Qeada, they're talking about prescription drugs, after-school programs, child care, abortion rights and so forth. The "anti-woman religious right" has been pretty firmly entrenched in the popular imagination, at least for a big slice of the electorate. And finally, who can deny that the high-tech boom of the 1990s, and the promise of yet further leaps in marketable technologies, combined with globalization and--perhaps most important of all--the efficient exporting of as many industry-heavy, unglamorous, low-wage jobs overseas as possible, has given the highly-educated, tech-savvy, university-accredited, upper-middle-class white-color professional the cat-bird seat in American culture? Just turn on the TV: a good 70% of our fantasies seem to be about upper-middle-class professionals hanging out in coffee shops.

So maybe we have gotten to the point where the Democrats can put forward a new kind of "progressive centrist" platform, one which doesn't necessarily present the Republicans with an obvious alternative strategy. But what really bothers me is the deep class bias present in this thesis. Judis and Teixeira put forward some (I think weak) arguments suggesting that some of the American working class will, in certain situations, absorb the professional, centrist liberalism of their better-off cultural superiors, enough to supplement the women, minorities and professionals in putting Democrats over the top. But that won't happen because of any government action or promises of action; it'll just happen naturally. And in the meantime, the actual economic and social needs and desires of the working class won't be present in the new "progressive" politics of the new Democratic majority. Indeed, they will want to avoid anything that smacks of reaching out to the (usually still church-going) working poor and lower-middle-class (unionization, anti-free trade policies, vouchers, faith-based initiatives, etc.), because that will turn off their new "progressive" upscale electoral base.

As long as we have capitalism, we will have a working class--until robots replace labor, there will be laborers, farmers, and factory workers. That means there will a class of people left out of most of the benefits and trends of society, both economic and cultural. The Democratic party, from FDR all the way up to Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, built policies which included the working class in its calculations; whether they served the working poor well or not, they certainly thought about them. Paradoxically, in their own way (limited but entirely insignificant way) so did the Republicans through the 1970s and 1980s: while their tax-cut fetishes certainly did not serve the needs of poor people well (particularly poor minorities), for better or worse the Republicans did at least take seriously the traditional cultural and social worldview of the "Silent Majority," the rural church-goer, the lower-middle-class and working class "Angry White Male." If Judis and Teixeira have their way, the Democratic party will sign on to a politics which is (socially, at least) cost-free, which simply talks about how to move around money and opportunity and respect at the top, or the near-top, rather than from the near-top to the bottom (or the middle). I hope it doesn't happen, because as long as there are only these two major parties, old-style Democratic rhetoric remains one of the few things which, in my view, prevents the Republicans from falling entirely into the hands of their old reliable friends, the corporate barons who have never deserted them. If the Democrats stop talking about class, can we count on the Republicans (who arguably turned to class and regional issues in the first place only because they saw a political opportunity back in the mid-1960s) to do so? Was Bush's compassionate conservatism for real? Will the Republican religious right start worrying about health care as well as gay marriage? (Given recent events in Alabama, it's unlikely.) Or may we be entering an era of American national politics in which, for the first time in nearly a century, poverty and cultural marginalization really is truly off the radar screen?

2003-10-23T11:56:00.000-05:00

Mother Teresa, St. Augustine, and the "Real World"

Christopher Hitchens's screed against Mother Teresa in Slate this week hasn't attracted too much attention in the blogosphere; Matthew Yglesias gets in a nice joke about it, thereby unleashing a torrent of commentary on his site, but that's about it. Perhaps not much attention is being paid because everyone has heard Hitchens's line on Mother Teresa before; indeed, he got a whole book out of it: The Missionary Position. (Ha! Good one Chris.) I read that book; and believe it or not, I found it deeply persuasive. But not in the way Hitchens intended, of that I'm certain.

Is there real substance to Hitchens's claim that Mother Teresa was "a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud"? Let's concentrate on that last one, because I think it is entirely possible that, in terms of Catholic orthodoxy, Mother Teresa and those who knew her would happily reply "guilty as charged" to the labels "fundamentalist" or even "fanatic." So what about the fraud bit? Well, she claimed to be working to help the poor, but Hichtens writes: "MT was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction. And she was a friend to the worst of the rich, taking misappropriated money from the atrocious Duvalier family in Haiti (whose rule she praised in return) and from Charles Keating of the Lincoln Savings and Loan." There is plenty of evidence to back up those claims, though the evidence can be read in different ways. And regardless, it is reasonable to assume that all the money and adulation which flowed towards Mother Teresa later in her life and work resulted in an environment (which Mother Teresa herself could not avoid being part of) that sometimes probably took on suspicious "cult of celebrity"-type air, with unseemly consequences. "The primitive hospice in Calcutta was as run down when she died as it always had been...and her order always refused to publish any audit," Hitchens writes. "But we have her own claim that she opened 500 convents in more than a hundred countries, all bearing the name of her own order. Excuse me, but this is modesty and humility?" Good question. However, the terms by which Hitchens comes to his conclusion are flawed. He misunderstands the measure of her life, because he does not believe in the manner of measurement appropriate to it.

The upshot of Hitchens's accusations is that Mother Teresa was only interested in "selfishly" pushing her "ideology" (we would say, her mission), and cared not one whit about how or through whom that ideology/mission found expression. She accepted donations (probably knowingly) from crooks. She wrote kind letters of appreciation to dictators. She posed for photos (perhaps knowingly) with blackmailers and murderers who allowed her sisters to operate in their territories. All this screams "hypocrite!" to Hitchens, who sees her as nothing more than faker (either wittingly or unwittingly so); as one who didn't care about her actions, but only her cause. Which certainly is hypocritical--if you think that cause and action are connected, as they are in this world. But what if you aren't of this world? Then, perhaps, we can call it something else: saintly. That is, a life lived not in the world--a life characterized by a mission that demands such self-sacrifice and commitment that worldly consequences and ramifications and reputations are swallowed up in the saint's creation of a space governed not by the struggle for human virtues like justice and freedom, or human goods like liberation and enlightenment, but by a devotion to something, strictly speaking, inhuman.

This is where St. Augustine comes in, who teaches the believing Christian that, while human virtues and goods aren't bad in themselves, they certainly aren't good in the eternal measurement of things. What matters is one's citizenship in the City of God; that is, what is crucial is where one's heart is. If one's heart is not here, in this world, then the measure of the world is more or less irrelevant. Of course, this is not the only possible way of being a consistent Christian in our fallen, political, economic, material world--but Augustine makes a powerful case for it being the only truly saintly way of being. Did criminals and murderers and wicked men contribute money to Mother Teresa's cause, hoping to gain something from their proximity to her? Very likely. Should that have troubled Mother Teresa? Not at all. After all, as Augustine reminds us, outside the City of God (and not one of us is fully in it, not now, not until the rest of God takes us), we're all criminals anyway:"What are kingdoms but great robber bands? What are robber bands but small kingdoms?" (City of God, Bk. 4, Chp. 4) This is hardly a good way to interact with others in a political sense: we must seek out standards of justice, build communities that exclude and include, form principles of law, all so that the limited goods of this life can be shared, rather than made subject to raw power and wealth. This is solid Catholic doctrine, and solid Christian doctrine as well: "If you want peace, work for justice." And it's true. But it's only true right here, right now, and the final supreme good of the believing Christian is neither here nor now: it is the eternal peace which the rest of God promises. In the meantime, justice is, well, valuable--but, in a very fundamental sense, it is limited too. "What about justice, whose function is to render to each his due, thereby establishing in man a certain just order of nature, so that the soul is subordinated to God, and the flesh to the soul, and consequently the flesh and the soul to God? Does it not demonstrate in performing this function that it is still laboring at its task instead of resting in the completion of its goal?" (City of God, Bk. 19, Chp. 4) Justice, and all mortal concerns, are by definition incomplete. Holiness, by contrast, in wholeness. If one wholly adored God, then the moral complications of discerning between what some deserve and others do not, of working out compromises when faced with hard moral choices, of deciding between just and unjust wars, indeed of all the necessary vicissitudes of ordinary life, would not trouble you one bit--and, as Hitchens proved (to me at least), that describes Mother Teresa's lack of care for the "real world," or "the big picture," or "the long term" very, very well. In short, I think Hitchens helps us understand why Mother Teresa really was a saint--and why most of us don't want to be one.

Fact is, few of us are cut out to be, or should seek to be, saints. And it's very possible that those who think they are cut out for such are in fact being motivated at least as much by some quirky, desperate, not-entirely-respectable complex of, shall we say, "inhuman" emotions as they are by the Spirit of God. Not too long ago, First Things ran a wise, somber essay asking a rather difficult question: why is it that Mother Teresa, who was a living saint if anyone was, apparently went throughout her life without much by way of spiritual comfort? What could drive a woman to so fully resign their citizenship in this world--its rewards and pains, its pleasures and difficulties--in favor of one which, by her own testimony, offered her little emotional solace? Perhaps she was crazy. Or perhaps, just perhaps, she had a saint's faith, a faith that took her completely out of this world. This is the conclusion reached by one anonymous respondent to Hitchens's piece; the author plainly isn't particularly religious, and I'd hardly agree with all his sentiments. But at least he or she recognizes that Mother Teresa demands a measurement which this "real world" can barely provide:

"Mother Teresa was not perfect. Whether she ought to be a 'saint' or not, I could give a rat's ass....But here's the thing. Is there any denying that this woman spent her entire life in the service of people so repulsive and destitute and unwanted that no one, not even God himself, gave a shit about them? Is there any hypocrisy, moral failing, misjudgment, or lapse that can trump that? If so, I'd like to know what it is....Recently, it was reported on NPR that, contrary to what many people, including myself, thought, Mother Teresa was not buoyed and comforted by any continued ecstatic experience of Christ or the presence of God. She apparently went virtually her entire life without feeling the presence of God at all—struggling alone with only other puny, weak and vacillating human being to help. She spent an entire life of service to others on pure faith. That kind of strength of character is beyond comprehension. It is beyond anything that Mr. Hitchens can accomplish if he had another 40 lifetimes of gin swilling and pontification."

Amen.

2003-10-17T11:12:00.000-05:00

Update

Remarkably, Josh Cherniss has followed up his long post on the thread on conservatism over at John Holbo's site, the post I commented on yesterday, with another long and excellent post which attacks the original question of John's which began the thread--namely, are the traditional ideological clusters of contemporary America (cultural collectivism/economic laissez faire in one corner; economic collectivism/cultural laissez faire in the other) at all coherent? Most of those of us who have commented on the thread have said "no" or "not really"; Josh argues, in a contrarian vein, "yes" (or at least, "mostly"). It's a smart post, and worth a read. He's says he'll get around eventually to responding to my actual comments; if so, wonderful, if not, well, he's in good company...

Incidentally, to those few who have wondered: Yes, I am pretty much on a one-post-a-week schedule (Thursdays, usually), and no, that probably won't change. I doubt I'll have the time, energy, or inclination to be prolific in my blogging the way I once imagined I could be, at least not until the new year and next semester. But we'll see. For the foreseeable future, I'll be content with being able to put together at least one nice, coherent, interesting blog-essay each week; I hope you will be too.

2003-10-16T12:51:00.000-05:00

Even More Thoughts on Political Labels

Twice before, I've written posts that relate to a discussion about political labels--initially dealing with conservatism, but later going in all sorts of directions--which developed on John Holbo's blog. Amazingly enough, nearly a month after John's original post, the thread is still alive, having been visited by such luminaries as Jacob Levy, Matthew Yglesias, Henry Farrell, and others. Now, Josh Cherniss has weighed in with a post on the thread which is actually longer, I think, than even my usually interminable posts, which is remarkable in itself. But the length is worth it; Josh's perspective on political ideology, pluralism, and many other related issues is informative and thought-provoking. In fact, I think I'll throw out a few provoked thoughts (I'll address them to Josh) right now.

Josh: "I take ideologies to refer to families of political philosophies which, in being associated with one another and with particular practical applications and goals, become both fuzzier and simpler--and, generally, cruder and more demanding. This is not necessarily to say that ideologies are bad, though. They're useful, and are as intellectually unsatisfying [to me at least; not to ideologues] as usefulness demands. I would also say that while political philosophies properly called are directed as discovering the truth about political things, ideologies are directed at justifying certain political arrangements or commitments), such as libertarianism, conservatism, etc."

Me: Speaking of how you tend to find that, when you reach a conclusion, Michael Walzer's ideas are somehow "already there"...isn't what you're describing as "ideology" essentially the same as the "moral minimalism" which Michael Walzer discusses in his book Thick and Thin; namely, the practice of taking a "thick" moral position and turning it into a caricature, a stick figure or bumper sticker, not as a better way to understand that philosophical position but as a way to make it politically useful across particularist boundaries? This isn't a criticism, just a thought.

J: "I think that talk of shared values often over-estimates the level of consensus in any culture or society. This isn't to say that some underlying consensus doesn't exist. It's to say, rather, that in certain cases the disagreements within a society are more significant, for political theory and practice, than the agreements (sometimes the opposite is true), and that shared values often give rise to vastly different interpretations. In many societies or cultures one has different camps who, appealing to the same shared values, interpret them in different ways, or draw different conclusions from them--and try to guide the society in the direction that their own views points to."

Me: Aren't you confusing "shared values" with "consensus" though? Rigorous communitarian thought is not ignorant of the contentious way in which values particular to a linguistic/cultural/historical community get worked out and then reworked again; but the ability to speak of a consensus or a lack thereof bespeaks the centrality of the shared worldview. Without that shared worldview, there'd be no way of knowing that the effort at consensus-building had broken down. This is a big part of Hans-Georg Gadamer's argument (which I think has strongly influenced better communitarian thinkers, like Charles Taylor) about the fusion of horizons in Truth and Method: there must be some mutual recognition of the space within which one speaks for people to acknowledge disagreement; otherwise, you're two ships passing in the night, completely unaware of what it is you're disagreeing about. To dismiss or criticize communitarian arguments because they don't appear to match the reality of lack of consensus within a community is to ignore or (I think wrongly) minimize the moral importance of the shared experience which must be present in every disagreement.

J: "It seems to me that political communities can sometimes abridge individual rights when upholding those rights would threaten the well-being of the members of that community in a suitably serious way, though it would have to be pretty serious. But I'm uncomfortable with the idea of a communal entity that is seen as having its own common, single interest, its own common, single good, and its own rights (and could thus impose obligations on individuals) in the same way as an individual does."

Me: The essential communitarian argument (which is also, speaking of various labels, a "social democratic" and a "republican" one) is that, as Michael Sandel famously put it in Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, "we can know a good in common that we cannot know alone." Such goods may not be secured by way of a regime of rights, as is usually conceived in connection with individuals. While there is a tremendous amount of literature out there on "group rights," most of it is driven by the sort of "liberal culturalism" which Will Kymlicka has often described: the idea that linguistic/cultural/historical groups can make claims on the state, and even (perhaps) on their participating members, because there are individual goods which depend upon the preservation of collective contexts within which said individuals can construct themselves. This is certainly a kind of communitarian argument, and I'm sympathetic to it. But thinkers like David Miller (or Sandel, or Walzer, at least in certain circumstances) are suggesting something more: that (at least some of) the sort of goods that can only be known in common are good in themselves; they are not relational but are inherent to the nature of the community. As such, to speak of these goods as in terms of the community having "rights...in the same way an individual does" is to apply the wrong sort of argumentative frame to the issue. The communal entity, in this sense, doesn't have "rights" that it has to exercise as a claim against some neutral background; rather, it has a nature (or a set of virtues, or a historical telos, or a socio-economic imperative, or whatever, depending on if your communitarianism is more Aristotelian or Hegelian or Marxist) that it expresses as its own background, and it is the authentic recognition of which thinkers like Miller are addressing. Obviously, it's a debatable premise--but to debate it properly, you need to put the individualistic framework into brackets, at least momentarily.

Perhaps Josh will respond; perhaps not. In any case, if you're at all interested in political philosophy and ideological labels, check out Josh's post, and especially the long, meandering thread over at John's place. All in all, some of the most intelligent observations on political thought that I've seen on the web in quite a while.

2003-10-09T13:16:00.001-05:00

Why this Recall was Wrong

Well, now it's all over, and everyone has had a good laugh (Jay Leno, in particular, seems to have gotten a lot more mileage than any expected out of being California's newest political impresario). Certainly I've been joking about it and needling my friends out in California. But now that the whole thing is done with, and Arnold is Governor Schwarzenegger, and Gray Davis is fated to slip away in humiliation, and once again a Kennedy has given star-struck Americans and legend-flogging journalists cause to gape in adoration at their magic, let me put on my political theorist cap and explain why I think the recall was bad news, from beginning to end. Nothing original here; just my two cents, not that I think all the combined cents of all the intelligent critics of the recall out there in the blogosphere are going to make much difference in the addled California political air.

Let's begin with the basics. Good government and civil liberties both equally depend upon stability and the rule of law. Self-government is tricky; there are particular problems and issues which arise when the power to rule is placed in the hands of those being ruled (as opposed to having a hereditary kingship or an educated aristocracy or an exclusive priesthood, or any number of other authoritarian systems, determine who is in charge, all of which have their own problems). One of the complications inherent to democratic forms of government is the drive to assume that the people's will is always paramount--after all, the government exists by, for, and on behalf of the people, right? However, "the people" is, by definition, fickle, given to factionalism, and rarely capable of perceiving the common good, all of which can threaten both decent government as well as the liberties of individuals (at least those not lucky enough to be in the majority). Hence those thinkers that have tried to develop free (or at least freer) societies over the centuries have again and again come back to the insistence that outside of the very specific rituals and forms of popular participation that have been made part of a society by law (and in our case, that means periodic elections, both primary and general), "the people" need to restrain themselves. Too much democracy, in other words, isn't democracy at all: it's the actions of mobs, and mobs can easily be tools in the hands of elites.

Is this a conservative argument in the traditionalist sense, a complaint about the seemingly (from an elite point of view) "crazy" things the people will do when given the power to act? Mickey Kaus seems to think so, labeling the "East Coast anti-recall harrumphers" (like George Will) a bunch of "anti-populist[s]...clinging to a reified concept of elections." But being devoted to traditional rules of election law isn't an act of "reification"; it's a responsible way of dealing with the inherent dangers (to, again, both good government and personal liberty) which representative self-rule cannot help but bring along with it, alongside all of the innumerable and (by me, at least) uncontested benefits which democracy and liberal freedoms provide. Leftists like Chris Mooney, normally never to be found occupying the same ground as conservatives, agree: "hyper-enfranchisement," the license to vote willy-nilly, isn't much better than complete disenfranchisement, because too often they mean the same thing: no time or opportunity for deliberation by the people, meaning no meaningful participation, meaning that one is still being ruled by whim--either the whims of those who are pulling the strings, or the collective whims of whatever mob shows up on Election Day. As for Kaus's famous "faster thesis," which holds that in the internet age people are that much more empowered to deliberate on the available information and thus still hold onto the strings of power...well, count me as one of those who somehow doubts that the very nature of human beings as political animals has changed so dramatically in the last, oh, ten years.

Many of the defenders of this recall insist that putting it in terms of the nature of self-government is much too much; this was a "one-off," never to be repeated, and has more to do with the particular problems of California at this particular moment. Well, ok, lets look at the particularity here. You have Governor Davis--an arguably lousy governor, a disliked governor, but one that was nominated and elected, not just once but twice. The fact that the process which led to his nomination and election was very likely far from open or fair, that the level of support he received from the electorate overall was miniscule compared to the total number of registered (to say nothing of potential) voters--all this is important and tragic, but not pertinent. Bad elections and bad democracy is not rectified by departing from the regular rules which govern democracy, even "just this once." I am fully aware that often--especially when the "margins of error," whether literal or metaphorical, are small--exactly where the rule of law begins and where it ends can be debated. The Florida recount in 2000, the last-minute replacement of a Democratic candidate in the 2002 New Jersey Senate race, the Texas redistricting controversy this year: did any of these political power plays, always made on behalf of "the people" (confused Dade and Miami County voters! party-line voting New Jersey Democrats! the frustrated Texas Republican majority!), go beyond the rules, and if so how? Not easily answered. But in this case, the answer is clear: Davis, whatever else one has to say about him, cannot plausibly be accused of being a crook, personally corrupt, or having fraudulently dealt with the people of California. They got what they (some of them) voted for. That's the law, those are the rules, and there things should have remained.

Even given all this, supporters of the recall may argue: but it wasn't a departure from the rules! It wasn't an attack on the rule of law! The recall happened because there was a law which provided for it; everything proceeded legally--and even, one may argue, "democratically" in the best sense, if one looks at the number of ballot complaints (very few), the voter turn-out (quite high), and other factors. Another cap in the hat of those who favor "progressive" democratic reforms? Hardly--because the recall was not just bad for California, but bad law. The recall would not have been triggered if a millionaire Republican and some of his buddies didn't decide to trigger it. There was no popular outcry against Governor Davis, at least not in the sense of an popular agitation: instead, there were hundreds of people throwing around cash to hire people to walk around malls with clipboards, to put on dinner parties to wine and dine contributors and media personalities, and so forth, all for the sake of getting to the magic number and putting the recall into effect. Even if one defends the idea of recall elections in principle, as an improvement to our democratic machinery and a nice supplement to our representative institutions, I don't see how this particular version of the principle can be defended. From beginning to end, this recall election was a thoroughly elite operation; the only significant difference being that, rather than traditional party elites (who are, in theory if admittedly not in practice, subject to popular involvement in the political process) dominating the election, media and Hollywood and business elites got an even bigger piece of the action than usual. John Scalzi's comments, though unnecessarily harsh, are appropriate here (as well as darkly funny):

"This was, at its root, one of the most flagrantly un-democratic (small 'd') elections in the history of the United States, and you [Californians] followed the script as if you were giggling, squealing paid extras. The recall was bought and paid for by one guy and orchestrated by a few zealots with an extremely narrow agenda, and both these parties were more than happy to push your emotional buttons to get you to do what they wanted you to do, which was boot the current and conventionally-elected office-holder for a chance to install someone more amenable to their own interests. Florida 2000 paranoids aside, this is the closest thing to a coup we've had in the country, and you swallowed it like it was a tasty treat. It's sickening, really....Yes, you say, but what about the voting percentages? More Californians voted in this special election than in the regular election! My response to this, of course, is: This is supposed to make me feel better? Californians are too damn apathetic to vote when they're supposed to and should have, but are more than happy to get off the friggin' couch for a stage-managed monkey show? I want to be clear, so there is no misunderstanding here: Every single person who voted in this election who did not vote in the actual gubernatorial election in 2002 is a complete and total fucking tool. You could not have been any more used if you were a spent condom. You are certainly not the same as, say, the folks in Minnesota who got out of the La-Z-Boy to vote Jesse Ventura into office: Ventura was voted in during an election not bought and paid for by political extremists....Yes, Gray Davis was unpopular. That's what you get when you don't vote, people. You want your leaders to reflect your interests, haul your whiny asses to the polls on a regular basis."

One last thing: fellow political scientist Chris Lawrence--besides making it fairly clear that a lot of his support for the recall has a lot to do with bottom-line "whatever it takes" Republican electoral success--has argued that recalls are in fact compatible with representative democracy, by way of analogy to the parliamentary practice of issuing a "vote of no confidence" when those ruling face great unpopularity. In his view, the recall procedure "allows the electorate to remove an executive or member of the legislature who is no longer acting consistently with their preferences. Since there is no continuous assembly of the electorate, and we don't schedule election days on a regular basis with no expectation of some election taking place, the recall petition procedure allows the electorate to schedule a recall election if one is needed...generally speaking, the recall provision is sound and there is no good reason why it should not be adopted elsewhere--it's one of the few 'progressivist' reforms that actually is good for democracy." This is a valid point, which addresses some of what I wrote above. However, the problem with this argument is twofold. 1) We don't have a parliamentary system, which allows for a fairly stable set of actors (i.e., elected representatives in a legislative body) to work out the details of executive power, or the dismissal of such; a recall provision in a political culture like our own, on the other hand, allows for a potentially endless supply of actors (in the case of the California recall, nearly 150 as it turned out!) to dilute (and thereby allow for the manipulation of) whatever democratic energy there may or may not be directed against a particular executive. 2) As Chris himself admits, recall elections serve well the aims of "proponents of the 'delegate' model of representative democracy (as opposed to the Burkean 'trustee' model)." Obviously, as basically a communitarian, I'm more sympathetic to the Burkean model than Chris is--but aside from that, surely an intelligent guy like Chris can recognize that, ideally, self-government requires elected representatives to constantly balance both of these imperatives (to reflect the wishes of their constituents, and to make the best judgments they can on their behalf)...and the more we applaud recalls, the more the balance will surely slip to the delegate side, perhaps until such a point that there isn't much difference between "the people" and the will of the government at all--at which point, all the aforementioned fears about the disappearancece of law and deliberation can come to pass.

I'm hardly opposed to all "progressive" reforms of our current democracy, though frankly I think few of them serve deliberative self-government the way their proponents believe. Indeed, I'm not even opposed to recall provisions. But this one, in California? This one was a mess.

2003-10-02T12:37:00.000-05:00

Plato meets Mamet

This was written a week or so ago, but who cares? It's wonderful. Thanks for the link to Chun's Mametesque philosophizing via John Holbo:

The Parmenides as Performed by the Characters in David Mamet's Heist:

JOE MOORE: Well that's the thing.

BOBBY BLANE: The one.

JM: No. the other thing.

BB: The many.

JM: What thing is that?

JIMMY SILK: Are you prepared to assert that we shall the find the single form actutally being divided? Is that the shot?

JM: You see, me and my men we know there's a single form for each distinction you make. We went in there and thought it.

JS: You have to admit that no such real being exists in the world. You're the help.

BB: (Violently) Oh. I'm the help. Suppose one of us is a master or slave of another: why then did the chicken cross the road? (Punches SR in the gut)

SR: (Muttering) The forms which we do not possess.

PINKY: I feel like the old race horse in Ibycus.

JS: The one in no sense is.

JM: Now can this possibly be the case with the thing?

JS: I do not think so.

JM: Then you hadn't ought to say it. It's insincere.